McComas has written a pleasing fairy tale that will satisfy many readers. But those looking for a more nuanced handling of...
She left her hometown 20 years ago, and no one has heard from her since. Is she even still alive? What could have been so horrific as to not only drive her away but also keep her away for so long?
McComas (Necessary Changes, 2001, etc.) gives Hannah Benson an intriguing past to uncover. After her mother and sister have passed away, leaving her teenaged niece, Anna, in need of a guardian, Hannah gets a call out of the blue from Grady Steadman, her childhood sweetheart. Now sheriff of Clearfield, Va., Grady must persuade Hannah to come back for Anna. It could be a tough sell: Hannah has spent the last 20 years making a very safe life for herself, avoiding romance and even building a career in insurance. Little does Grady suspect that coming home will force Hannah to face the demons of her past: an abusive father, a dysfunctional family and a town that let it all happen. Of course, the reader can guess all this within the first few pages. Despite her misgivings, Hannah will do the right thing and return to Clearfield to take care of her family’s loose ends. Despite the emotional damage inflicted by her abusive father, she will easily come to love again. With a last name like “Steadman,” of course, Grady will become the steady man in Hannah’s life as she confronts her demons. Her niece will eventually come to bond with her Aunt Hannah. And “what happened to Hannah” will be revealed over the course of the novel. Yet “what happened to Hannah” is so heavily hinted at that when it is revealed it comes as little surprise.
McComas has written a pleasing fairy tale that will satisfy many readers. But those looking for a more nuanced handling of the repercussions of childhood trauma should look elsewhere.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-208478-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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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