What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. 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. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. 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. The dark and light sides of friendship breathlessly explored in a novel best saved for summer beachside reading.įour 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. But Caitlin, whose own demons have been hinted at, will not be so lucky. Though the wedding briefly revives Vix’s old feelings for Bru, whom Caitlin is marrying, Vix is soon in love with Gus, another old summer friend, and a more compatible match. After high school, Caitlin travels the world and can’t understand why Vix, by now at Harvard on a scholarship and determined to have a better life than her mother has had, won’t drop out and join her. Blume knows the way kids and teens speak, but her two female leads are less credible as they reach adulthood. Caitlin, determined never to be ordinary, is always testing the limits, and in adolescence falls hard for Von, an older construction worker, while Vix falls for his friend Bru. The years in between are related in brief segments by numerous characters, but mostly by Vix. The story of how this casual invitation turns the two girls into what they call "Summer sisters" is prefaced with a prologue in which Vix is asked by Caitlin to be her matron of honor. Caitlin, on the other hand, lives part of the year with her wealthy mother Phoebe, who’s just moved to Albuquerque, and summers with her father Lamb, equally affluent, on the Vineyard. Victoria, or more commonly Vix, lives in a small house her brother has muscular dystrophy her mother is unhappy, and money is scarce. In sixth grade, when Victoria Weaver is asked by new girl Caitlin Somers to spend the summer with her on Martha’s Vineyard, her life changes forever. ![]() The years pass by at a fast and steamy clip in Blume’s latest adult novel (Wifey, not reviewed Smart Women, 1984) as two friends find loyalties and affections tested as they grow into young women. Living, breathing humans and fresh scenery make this a better-than-average technobattle. Armies, navies, and air forces collide, and everybody gets very, very cold. Harrow becomes the core of the resistance movement when she teams up with a squad of sharpshooting, snow-suited, ski- borne American paratroopers. America doesn't take this lying down, of course, Despite the world's stupidest president, the US puts together its own multiforce counterattack, and Ms. The Russians catch everybody except pretty volcano-scientist and former nurse Dana Harrow, who is off checking her seismographs. Cold war gets new life then as the Russians launch a sudden, fast, multiforce attack on the scientific study base in Antarctica, where the Americans are digging as fast as they can to reach the mother lode of rubidium. ![]() The Soviets know all about the space shield, and they know that if the Americans get control of the rubidium, it is the last nail in the coffin of the Evil Empire. ![]() Of course, no hypersecret is safe these days. Harrison (Storming Intrepid, 1989) shrewdly leaves the desert fighting to the real armies, taking his fighting forces to Antarctica, where a joint Soviet-American scientific project has dug up core samples rich in rubidium-an element essential to America's hypersecret new strategic defense gadget, an invisible shield that evaporates incoming missiles. Soviet and American forces slug it out over strategic materials in the frozen South, where a dormant volcano is waking up in a terrible mood.
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