JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. 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. 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 book reads like a cheesy episode of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.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. Even though there are entertaining moments, DeAngelis’ prose is run-of-the-mill and her observations, somewhat obvious.

But as she tells him: “I make friends…I just can’t keep them.” Lee joins Maren on her quest to find her father, and a good portion of the book is about their developing relationship. Maren decides to find her dad by herself, and at a Wal-Mart in the middle of the country, she finally meets another cannibal closer to her own age. He weaves a rope out of hair from people he's eaten. Sully is a talkative man, and there’s something a bit sinister about him, too. It isn’t until she sets out on the road to find her father that she finally meets one of her own kind.

She ate the son of her mother’s boss during a party. She ate a boy who befriended her at summer camp. She devoured the kind babysitter who showed her affection, and things only got worse from there. Maren started eating people when she was a little kid. In DeAngelis’ ( Petty Magic, 2010, etc.) third novel, 16-year-old Maren is determined to track down her father after her mother, who clearly loves her but is scared for her own life, abandons her, leaving behind some money and the girl's birth certificate, which includes some important information: her father’s name. Love is challenging for any species-but things get more complicated when you’re a ghoul who wants to eat anyone who gets close to you.

The bones and all book