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. More Hallmarkiana, from a shameless expert in the genre.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. The psychological dam broken, love will at last be able to flow. What is it that holds him back, when there just isn't any question but that he loves Denise and vice versa-not to mention that he's "great" with Kyle, just like a father? It will require a couple of near-death experiences (as fireman Taylor bravely risks his life to save others) emotional steadiness from the intelligent, good, true Denise and the terrible death of a dear and devoted friend before Taylor will come to the point at last of confiding to Denise the terrible memory of how his father died-and the guilt that's been its legacy to Taylor. Love blooms in the weeks that follow-until Taylor suddenly begins putting on the brakes. Okay? When Denise has a car accident in a bad storm, she's rescued by volunteer fireman Taylor-who also rescues little Kyle after he wanders away from his injured mom in the storm. He's done this twice before, and now he does it again with pretty and sweet single mother Denise Holton, age 29, who's moved from Atlanta to Taylor's town of Edenton, North Carolina, in order to devote her time more fully to training her four-year-old son Kyle to overcome the peculiar impediment he has that keeps him from achieving normal language acquisition. That vestige involves the deep dark secret-it has something to do with his father's death when son Taylor was nine-that haunts kind, good 36-year-old local contractor Taylor McAden and makes him withdraw from relationships whenever they start getting serious enough to maybe get permanent. His writing has improved-though it's still the equivalent of paint-by-numbers-and he makes use this time of at least a vestige of credible psychology. High-stakes weepmeister Sparks ( A Walk to Remember, 1999, etc.) opts for a happy ending his fourth time out.