Funny, sweet-natured and well-crafted, but perhaps suited best to a YA audience.
Whimsical characters and charm make for an amiable diversion.
Hallie Palmer, 16, spends much of her free time at the track. Or at the clandestine weekly poker game in the church basement. Or at the local Indian casino—until her age is revealed. She’s no compulsive gambler, just a whiz with numbers. Forget college. As soon as she can afford her own car, she’s off to Vegas. Feeling ostracized at school, crowded at home (Mother is pregnant with her eighth child), and weary of her parents’ expectations, Hallie can’t wait for her day of departure. After she loses a bundle at the track—there goes her Vegas car—she answers an ad for yard help at the Stockton estate, and the fun begins. In the old rambling “manse” live Ms. Olivia, a political Auntie Mame, her husband The Judge (a Colonel Sanders look-a-like in the last stages of Alzheimer’s), her son Mr. Bernard (an unabashedly poufy antiques dealer), Bernard’s husband Mr. Gil (Hallie thinks of him as the normal one, until he gives her a “reading” based on the condition of her teeth), and Rocky (an alcoholic chimp). In one fell swoop, Hallie gets the job, drops out of school, and runs away from home (she sleeps in the Stocktons’ summer house). Problems need to be sorted out—the truant officer, her parents—but the story lies in the way Hallie blooms under the Stocktons’ care, receiving a world-class education in the art of eccentricity. Ms. Olivia writes pornography for pin money, Rocky mixes the evening cocktails, Bernard and Gil school Hallie on old movies, antiques, fine food, and how to walk like Audrey Hepburn. Pedersen has created a wonderful assemblage of characters in the Stocktons—if only something of more substance were going on.
Funny, sweet-natured and well-crafted, but perhaps suited best to a YA audience.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45830-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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