Showing posts with label brothers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label brothers. Show all posts
Feb 21, 2019
Apr 1, 2018
Mar 1, 2016
Nov 1, 2014
The Key That Swallowed Joey Pigza - Jack Gantos
The Key That Swallowed Joey Pigza - Gantos, JackSummary: A conclusion to the series that includes Joey Pigza Loses Control finds Joey dropping out of school to help care for his baby brother and searching for clues to his father's disappearance.
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* The fifth and (ostensibly) final book in the multi-award-winning Joey Pigza chronicle features all of the drama, havoc, and heart readers have come to expect, dread, and love. Joey is back in his roachy row house with his mother and new baby brother, Carter Jr., as the family works to find some normalcy following the tragicomic chaos perpetrated by his now-absent father. But it's not long before Fran, struggling with postpartum depression, checks herself into a hospital, leaving Joey to take care of the baby alone. Gantos piles on the problems, defining them in searing, heartrending detail; for all the peril of Joey's circumstances, it is his parents' brutal honesty that leaves welts. Still, Joey's indomitable spirit, grounded in his fierce, tender devotion to baby Carter and expressed through Gantos' inimitable comic tone, shows the fragile adults around him just what it looks like to be the man of the house. The book, with the series, closes on a fitting note of tenuous, plausible hope. High-Demand Backstory: The conclusion of Gantos' beloved and much-lauded series is big news, and Joey's fans of all ages will want to grab their copies as soon as possible.
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Apr 1, 2014
May we be forgiven - A.M. Homes
Summary: Feeling overshadowed by his more-successful younger brother, Harold is shocked by his brother's violent act that irrevocably changes their lives, placing Harold in the role of father figure to his brother's adolescent children and caregiver to his aging parents. \
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Incisive, funny, and commanding, Homes broke new ground in her last novel, This Book Will Save Your Life (2006). She continues in the same philosophical and stylistic vein in this eventful family tragicomedy set in New York's Westchester County and ignited by an epic, even biblical battle between two brothers in a Jewish family rife with feuds and subterfuge. George is a successful, arrogant, and bullying television executive with a lonely wife and exceptionally smart, sensitive children. Historian Harry endures a chilly, childless marriage, cocooned within his scholarly obsession with Richard Nixon. Resentments boil over, horrific violence ensues, and Harry finds himself in "an endless free fall," struggling to be a good parent to his nephew and niece while entangling himself in scary if hilarious Internet-initiated sexual predicaments. Homes sends her magnetic characters on a wild, mordantly comic, deeply moving odyssey through a shopping mall, nursing home, the wilderness, schools, an amusement park, a South African village, and a lawyer's office, where Harry reads an astonishing, newly discovered Nixon archive. In this frenetic, insightful, and complexly moral novel of a man transformed by crisis, Homes dramatizes hubris and greed, alienation and spirituality, improvised families, and justice in our age of smart phones, dumbed-down education, and bankrupt culture. Copyright 2012 Booklist Reviews.
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Mar 1, 2012
East of Eden - John Steinbeck
Summary: This novel, set in the rich farmlands of California's Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families--the Trasks and the Hamiltons--whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. The story of two brothers, Aron is a clean-cut model student, engaged to be married, the pride of his hardworking father. Cal is a rebellious loner, sternly rejected by his father.
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Aug 3, 2010
Fragile beasts: a novel - Tawni O'Dell
Fragile beasts: a novel - O'Dell, Tawni
Summary: Presents the story of brothers Kyle and Klint, whose precarious lives in Pennsylvania coal country are further challenged by their alcoholic father's death, until they are taken in by a septuagenarian curmudgeon with a tragic past. - (Baker & Taylor)
Booklist Reviews
Their father was a notorious drunk; their mother, a self-absorbed shrew who callously abandoned them for life with another man. After their father is killed in a senseless accident, teenage brothers Klint and Kyle Hayes face being returned to their mother's custody against their will. For Klint, the move to Arizona would mean sacrificing his attention-getting baseball career at the height of the college and pro-scouting season. For sensitive and artistic Kyle, holding onto the only home he has ever known is essential to making sure his brother achieves the success necessary to free them both from the oppression of their small, western Pennsylvania mining town. Salvation comes in the unlikely form of Candace Jack, a wealthy and reclusive elderly woman who is persuaded to give the boys a home, and herself a second chance to feel love again. In this tough and tender tale, O'Dell's triumphant portrait of loss and rejection, sanctuary and redemption, shines with poignancy, dignity, and transcendent joy. Copyright 2010 Booklist Reviews.
Sing them home - Stephanie Kallos
Sing them home - Kallos, Stephanie
Summary: Everyone in Emlyn Springs knows the story of Hope Jones, the physician's wife whose big dreams for their tiny town were lost along with her in the tornado of 1978. For Hope's three young children, the stability of life with their preoccupied father, and with Viney, their mother's spitfire best friend, is no match for Hope's absence. Larken, the eldest, is now an art history professor who seeks in food an answer to a less tangible hunger; Gaelan, the son, is a telegenic weatherman who devotes his life to predicting the unpredictable; and the youngest, Bonnie, is a self-proclaimed archivist who combs roadsides for clues to her mother's legacy, and permission to move on. When they're summoned home after their father's death, each sibling is forced to revisit the childhood tragedy that has defined their lives.
Booklist Reviews
Things are swept away by tornados in Emlyn Springs, Nebraska: pianos, houses, and a young girl and her mother. Although the young girl, Bonnie Jones, is eventually recovered, her mother, Aneira Hope Jones, never resurfaces. The painful circumstances surrounding their mother s death leave the Jones children, Larken, Gaelen, and Bonnie (henceforth christened Flying Girl), emotionally stunted and struggling to learn how to love. Years later, when another natural disaster draws them together, the three are confronted by the clouded past that has haunted them since childhood. In multiple ways, it is the community members of Emlyn Springs who teach these motherless children how to love again. Sing Them Home ushers us into small-town life, with all its distinctive cultural nuances, eccentric personalities, and homegrown secrets. With the same beauty and lyricism of her first novel, Broken for You (2004), Kallos stitches together a colorful patchwork of memories and images, creating a rich narrative fabric that develops and changes as it passes through each character s hands. Copyright Booklist Reviews 2008.
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Jun 1, 2010
Cutting for stone: a novel – A. Verghese
Cutting for stone: a novel - Verghese, A.
Summary: Twin brothers born from a secret love affair between an Indian nun and a British surgeon in Addis Ababa, Marion and Shiva Stone come of age in an Ethiopia on the brink of revolution, where their love for the same woman drives them apart.
BookPage Reviews
Author of the much-praised medical memoir My Own Country, Verghese, who is a doctor as well as an author, now offers an expertly composed first novel about missionaries in India and Africa. In 1947, Sister Mary Joseph Praise leaves her missionary post in India to take a new position in Yemen. Traveling by ship to her new home, she saves the life of a fellow passenger—an English physician named Thomas Stone. Their meeting proves a fateful one, as Sister Praise comes to realize when she and Thomas are reunited at a hospital in Addis Ababa. Years later, she dies giving birth to twins—sons named Shiva and Marion, who are raised in Addis Ababa in an atmosphere of political upheaval. Their adopted parents are doctors at the local hospital, and the boys are raised within the confines of the medical complex. Marion serves as narrator for this poignant novel, recounting the story of how his foster parents met. As the two brothers become doctors themselves, they find that their destinies are bound up in each other and in the place they call home. Covering a 50-year span, Verghese’s accomplished novel has plenty of narrative momentum, moving smoothly between exotic locales and exploring ambitious themes of race, identity and family. An insightful and assured writer, Verghese writes from the heart about medicine and politics—timely topics that are clearly dear to him.
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