An accomplished first novel about the American family.
Affecting, original debut about a girl’s coming of age, set against the backdrop of the NASA space-shuttle program.
Eleven-year-old Dolores Gray dreams of becoming an astronaut, an aspiration that’s a little less far-fetched for her than for the average American kid. A math prodigy and the daughter of a NASA technician, Dolores has grown up in the shadow of Cape Canaveral and its gleaming promise of space travel. Her father, Frank, takes her to all the launches; they have cozy conversations about rocket boosters; and Dolores keeps a secret diary about the lives of the astronauts. But late in the summer of 1984, her father is laid off, and everything seems to lose its center. At her middle school, Dolores befriends intense fellow whiz-kid Eric Biersdorfer, whose father is NASA’s Director of Launch Safety. Hoping he might be persuaded to rehire Frank, Mrs. Gray invites Eric’s family to dinner and then begins an affair (or so Dolores believes) with Mr. Biersdorfer. Soon thereafter, Frank is rehired, and his wife moves out. Over the ensuing months, Dolores and her younger sister Delia rarely see their mother, but they overhear muffled cries during their father’s late-night phone conversations. In the fall of 1985, Dolores starts high school (a year early), where smoking, sex and cutting class compete for her attention with the reliable launches and returns that at last make her beloved space-shuttle program seem invincible. When the Challenger explodes in January 1986, the fragile threads of hope Dolores had clung to—that her mother would return, that her father’s job was secure, that her future could be shaped by her will to fly—disintegrate along with the shuttle. Dean deftly shapes her tale, moving from the complicated social system of children and piercing details of adolescent cruelty (Dolores begins to shun Eric at school at the prodding of an alpha girl) to the secretive world of parents and the lofty aspirations of those dedicated to the mystery of outer space.
An accomplished first novel about the American family.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-7432-9722-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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