A sentimental, contemporary women’s novel with a retro vibe that’s engaging despite its flaws.
Newspaper journalist and novelist Ferrendelli (An Invincible Summer, 2015, etc.) tells the story of a troubled big-city reporter who starts over in a small town.
Bridgette Connor of the Reporter-Herald in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is emotionally spent when she flees the state, haunted by the suicide of one of her exposé subjects and heartbroken over her own decision to terminate her pregnancy. She has no intention of stopping in Windsor, Kentucky, until an automobile accident strands her there. She stumbles, injured, into the Sunrise Diner, where Alexis Parker, the proprietor, helps her to find medical help and gives her a place to stay. The two immediately hit it off, and Bridgette starts a new life in Windsor with Alexis; her daughter, Eden, who has various special needs; and her African-American housekeeper, nanny, and friend, Eda Mae Fletcher. After two false starts at resuming her journalism career, Bridgette realizes that she’s meant to work at the diner, and after providing Alexis with emergency financial assistance, she becomes her business partner. The two women confront myriad challenges together but are still unprepared for a devastating crisis. Later, Alexis must act when it seems that Eden’s biological father, Cal, is determined to do what’s worst for his daughter. This novel is largely an emotionally satisfying read, reminiscent at times of Fannie Flagg’s 1987 novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. However, the author often has Bridgette and Alexis proclaim their deep, abiding friendship for each other in dialogue rather than simply showing it in action. One secondary character, postal employee Blanche Ashby, provides comic relief and is more fully developed than some of the other players; Eda Mae, in particular, feels like a throwback, stock character of early- to mid-20th-century literature. Pragmatic readers may also wonder how Bridgette could indefinitely stay on in Windsor after initially intending to seek refuge there for just one night.
A sentimental, contemporary women’s novel with a retro vibe that’s engaging despite its flaws.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5406-8247-5
Page Count: 324
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four 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.
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. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. 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. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. 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. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
