The Kill Price by Jose Yglesias
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50books_poc29)The Kill Price by Jose Yglesias
The story of a Chicano journalist caught between his heritage and the Upper East Side community he's become a part of, dealing with the impending death of a close friend with lung cancer. It's a short novel, only 150 pages, but it wasn't the quick read I'd rather hoped it would be (I'm falling behind on my 50 because of NaNoWriMo). Instead, every scene is packed full of intense emotion that takes time and effort to unpack.
It felt a lot like a play, perhaps an Albee play, with three intimate acts slowly revealing the hidden motives behind the small set of characters as the intensity ratchets and the period between dramatic outbursts decreases. But as a novel it accomplished things a play couldn't do, providing extended, ambling flashback scenes that gave everything that much more solidity.
The friendship of Wolf and Jack is so strong and so beautifully complicated. The way they tease each other is filled with thirty years of history. Actually, everything here feels like it has true history behind it, a constructed world that is internally consistent. And the resolution is heartbreaking but in that way that good books have of breaking your heart and leaving you knowing you're a better person for having experienced the pain.
The story of a Chicano journalist caught between his heritage and the Upper East Side community he's become a part of, dealing with the impending death of a close friend with lung cancer. It's a short novel, only 150 pages, but it wasn't the quick read I'd rather hoped it would be (I'm falling behind on my 50 because of NaNoWriMo). Instead, every scene is packed full of intense emotion that takes time and effort to unpack.
It felt a lot like a play, perhaps an Albee play, with three intimate acts slowly revealing the hidden motives behind the small set of characters as the intensity ratchets and the period between dramatic outbursts decreases. But as a novel it accomplished things a play couldn't do, providing extended, ambling flashback scenes that gave everything that much more solidity.
The friendship of Wolf and Jack is so strong and so beautifully complicated. The way they tease each other is filled with thirty years of history. Actually, everything here feels like it has true history behind it, a constructed world that is internally consistent. And the resolution is heartbreaking but in that way that good books have of breaking your heart and leaving you knowing you're a better person for having experienced the pain.
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