A histrionic but reflective story about gaining maturity and knowledge.
A girl uses the key to her grandparent’s sock drawer to unlock lesson-rich adventures in this fantasy novel.
After her grandmother’s death, 13-year-old Sukey Durand travels with her father from San Diego to southeastGeorgia, where they remain for some time to prepare her late grandma’s house for sale. One day, Sukey gets a letter addressed only to her, to be opened in private. The missive is from her late grandmother, and includes what the elderly woman called “my most precious treasure”: the key to her sock drawer. Inside the drawer are three very different pairs of socks: one that’s warm and woolly; one that’s patterned with puppies; and lacy footies. Donning each pair takes Sukey on surprising voyages to three magical lands. The first is inhabited by people with either pig or mule faces; in the second are talking frogs, who are facing oppression. Finally, Sukey visits a cave of memories, where family trees grow upside down. In each location, the girl learns lessons, such as how to teach mulish and pigheaded people to get along by recognizing one another’s strengths. Meanwhile, she learns more about her grandmother and a source of family estrangement, and realizes that “Things that go wrong need to start anew.” In her debut book, Agauas mixes adventure and Christian allegory in a way that’s mildly reminiscent of C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. This is most evident in the middle section, set in the city of Mare-C in the land of Evol (“love” spelled backward). Here, a Christlike figure called Amik, a beaver, repudiates the evil Skunk Bear, reminding everyone that “all debts are covered for all those that choose to live and love in Mare-C.” The scenes are imaginative and not too heavy-handed, but sometimes the book strains for effect; Sukey takes an agonizingly long time—likely well past the point of readers’ patience—to open the letter, find the drawer, and unlock it, and her thoughts are frequently slowed by melodramatic digressions in the form of massed, one-sentence paragraphs.
A histrionic but reflective story about gaining maturity and knowledge.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-73227-111-1
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Why Not Now? Children's Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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