Klass plays it too safe here, with wise cracks and glib feel-good moments replacing real drama and self-exploration.
Pediatrician Klass (The Mystery of Breathing, 2004, etc.) offers a mild, episodic novel about a tough but warmhearted pediatrician whose life as a doctor, wife and mother is informed by her own childhood in foster care.
Lucy and her English professor husband Greg are the doting suburban parents of socially astute ten-year-old Isabel and intellectually brilliant but socially awkward six-year-old Freddy. Lucy is fiercely protective of her children, particularly sensitive Freddy. But when she’s not driving Lucy to soccer or Freddy to birthday parties, she is running a clinic in Boston treating poor, neglected and abused children, many placed in foster care. Raised in the foster system herself until a favorite English teacher adopted her, Lucy strongly identifies with her patients and has difficulty separating her family life from her work. Instead of an evolving plot, there are slice-of-Lucy’s life incidents. Traveling to California to give a medical lecture, she becomes entangled with a 12-year-old boy whose braininess reminds her of Freddy and whose neglectful father reminds her that wealth does not ensure good parenting. On a family beach vacation, she obsesses about a news story concerning murdered kids in Boston. At her children’s private school, of which she is often wittily if self-righteously disdaining, a parent asks Lucy’s help in blocking a supposedly bogus abuse charge. A charming but irresponsible mother abandons her children at Lucy’s clinic, then briefly steals them back before willingly relinquishing them for good with Lucy’s guidance. Greg confesses a brief infidelity, only making the bonds of his marriage to Lucy stronger. Similarly, although Isabel gets mildly annoyed with Lucy at times, she and gentle genius Freddy prove to be the supersmart, superloving kids other parents don’t want to hear bragged about. Lucy, sometimes likable if overbearing, is a bit too perfect to connect to readers.
Klass plays it too safe here, with wise cracks and glib feel-good moments replacing real drama and self-exploration.Pub Date: July 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-618-55596-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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