A mostly enjoyable, if flawed, set of stories.
Tales of grace and despair abound in a new short story collection from Mulhern (Drenched to the Bone, 2016, etc.).
Most of these stories follow Molly Bonamici, a girl coming of age in Italian-American Boston. Her parents are consumed by work, so her main bond is with her beloved grandmother, or “Nonna.” In “Through a Convent Gate,” Molly and Nonna visit a crabby alcoholic neighbor’s home—a trip that first seems compassionate but then becomes a robbery. In “Mannequin,” Molly’s prank on an obnoxious college roommate leads to an unexpectedly extreme outcome. In “Smoke Rings,” she and Nonna conspire to fake an injury and scam a bank manager, discussing some facts of life afterward, and in “Myra Bocca,” an older Molly living in Florida encounters an intrusive shop proprietor who unexpectedly steals her credit card. Only two entries focus on other characters: the title story, in which a young boy forms an unlikely bond with a perpetually unlucky and alcoholic neighbor, and the final piece, which tells of a young teacher in a dysfunctional classroom, struggling to understand his own divorce. Mulhern demonstrates considerable powers of description, particularly when portraying his saddest characters: one woman, for example, has “broken capillaries that sloped down the sides of her nostrils” and “spindly, awkward limbs [that] stuck out of a round body, like you might see in a kindergartner’s rendering of a person.” Another of the author’s strengths is in eliciting compassion for less-than-likable figures. Nonna, for example, sneers at others and cheerfully damages Molly’s moral compass, but a glimpse of her aging, bruised body connotes a life of hard living. Molly herself is harder to pin down, showing compassion in some stories and cold detachment in others. Some of the material is repeated with variations—one story, for example, appears again as part of a later, longer piece, and it’s debatable whether this repetition creates meaningful layers or simply takes up space. Mulhern also offers some distractingly over-the-top moments (including a few deaths that seem almost cartoonish), but the quieter scenes show the mind of a talented writer at work.
A mostly enjoyable, if flawed, set of stories.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5233-1859-9
Page Count: 128
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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