An affecting novel with touches of the fantastical, weaving explorations of power, youth, wealth, and familial love.
A young woman gets caught in the orbit of a wealthy, suspicious executive in this contemporary retelling of the Persephone and Demeter myth.
Cory Ansel, freshly 18, returns to River Rock, the summer camp of her youth, to work as a counselor after graduating high school without being accepted to a single college. On the last night of camp, she meets Rolo Picazo, father of one of her campers and CEO of Southgate Pharmaceuticals, whose “highly effective, highly popular, highly pleasant, highly safe, frankly groundbreaking painkiller” is now the subject of a damning investigation. Smooth-talking Rolo offers Cory $20,000 to be his children’s temporary nanny on his private island. Once Cory arrives on Little Île des Bienheureux, the unsettling events that readers will surely anticipate by now begin to rack up—the other staff confuse her with Kelly, the former babysitter who “went away”; her employer, when he’s around, is alternately indulgent and cruel; and there’s no cell service. Third-person chapters describing Cory’s increasingly perilous adventure alternate with first-person chapters narrated by Cory’s furious and deliriously worried mother, Emer. With a professional crisis of her own imminent and her child seemingly vanished, Emer sets off on a daunting quest to track down her daughter. Cory, described by her mother as “arrogant, beautiful, and dumb,” is so painfully naïve that readers should be forgiven for their inevitable frustrations with her, and yet Lyon’s skillful and luscious prose encourages empathy for both Cory and Emer. The book gets to the visceral heart of Cory’s broken spirit, her fractured relationship with her mother, and the love that binds them together despite everything. Readers need not be overly familiar with the myth to enjoy the well-told story.
An affecting novel with touches of the fantastical, weaving explorations of power, youth, wealth, and familial love.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781668020852
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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