by Colleen Hoover ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 31, 2023
A thoughtful exploration of how poverty impacts people's choices and blurs the lines between good and bad behavior.
A 19-year-old Kentucky girl—the product of a one-night stand—finds her addict mother dead and ends up spending the summer in Texas with her father and his family.
After a lifetime of active neglect from her mother, Beyah Grim comes home one day from her shift at McDonald’s to find her dead on the sofa, needle still in her arm. All the child support money sent by her father has been spent on her mother’s addictions. The system has failed her. She taught herself to use a stove at age 6 and did whatever was necessary throughout her life to make sure there was food on the table. She's vowed never to become like her mother, and volleyball is her way out—all she needs is a place to stay for two months until her full ride to Penn State begins on Aug. 3. So when she's quickly evicted from the trailer she and her mother shared, she calls her father; he books her a ticket on the earliest possible flight to Houston. When she arrives, she discovers that Alana, her father’s wife of a year, has a daughter named Sara who's just a little older than Beyah and a summer house on the beach on Bolivar Peninsula, where Beyah and her father head straight from the airport. Once Beyah settles in, Sara and her boyfriend, Marcos, begin trying to set her up with their friend Samson. Pegging the guy as a rich douchebag, Beyah soon realizes there's more to him that he lets on and that despite his purported wealth he is just as damaged as her. This is the story of a summer love affair as Beyah and Samson get to know one another, sharing their darkest secrets until Samson’s past catches up with him. Hoover spends a lot of time dissecting class prejudices against a gossamer backdrop of summer love that evolves to become much more.
A thoughtful exploration of how poverty impacts people's choices and blurs the lines between good and bad behavior.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9781668021910
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by Mitch Albom ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 14, 2023
A captivating allegory about evil, lies, and forgiveness.
Truth and deception clash in this tale of the Holocaust.
Udo Graf is proud that the Wolf has assigned him the task of expelling all 50,000 Jews from Salonika, Greece. In that city, Nico Krispis is an 11-year-old Jewish boy whose blue eyes and blond hair deceive, but whose words do not. Those who know him know he has never told a lie in his life—“Never be the one to tell lies, Nico,” his grandfather teaches him. “God is always watching.” Udo and Nico meet, and Udo decides to exploit the child’s innocence. At the train station where Jews are being jammed into cattle cars bound for Auschwitz, Udo gives Nico a yellow star to wear and persuades him to whisper among the crowd, “I heard it from a German officer. They are sending us to Poland. We will have new homes. And jobs.” The lad doesn’t know any better, so he helps persuade reluctant Jews to board the train to hell. “You were a good little liar,” Udo later tells Nico, and delights in the prospect of breaking the boy’s spirit, which is more fun and a greater challenge than killing him outright. When Nico realizes the horrific nature of what he's done, his truth-telling days are over. He becomes an inveterate liar about everything. Narrating the story is the Angel of Truth, whom according to a parable God had cast out of heaven and onto earth, where Truth shattered into billions of pieces, each to lodge in a human heart. (Obviously, many hearts have been missed.) Truth skillfully weaves together the characters, including Nico; his brother, Sebastian; Sebastian’s wife, Fannie; and the “heartless deceiver” Udo. Events extend for decades beyond World War II, until everyone’s lives finally collide in dramatic fashion. As Truth readily acknowledges, his account is loaded with twists and turns, some fortuitous and others not. Will Nico Krispis ever seek redemption? And will he find it? Author Albom’s passion shows through on every page in this well-crafted novel.
A captivating allegory about evil, lies, and forgiveness.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780062406651
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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