A diverting tale featuring a protagonist with an atypical job.
In Parker’s debut novel, a woman chooses an unconventional vocation—helping women secure indisputable proof of their husbands’ adultery.
Bree, a 28-year-old New Yorker, is thrilled to visit her best friend, Chloe, in Nova Scotia, Canada. Although they’ve stayed in contact, they haven’t seen each other in person since they were 13. But Chloe’s despair spoils their happy reunion; her marriage to kindhearted Brody is in trouble, as he wants children and she doesn’t. Shockingly, Bree later learns that Chloe may be cheating on her husband, and Chloe drunkenly asks her to seduce Brody, in order to provide grounds for a divorce. Bree doesn’t do so, and she ultimately works out a plan that benefits Brody, whom she believes is a good man. Later, however, she gets a call from a woman named Samantha, who got Bree’s number from Chloe. Samantha asks whether Bree would be willing to seduce her husband—but not sleep with him—in order to prove that he would stray, if given the opportunity. Bree has been feeling guilty over her own affair with a married man named Adam, three years ago, and she sees the offer as an opportunity to give wives an incentive to end painful marriages. And with the money Samantha is paying—$25,000—there’s a good chance that Bree could turn this situation into a sustainable career. Although Bree only has a couple of paying gigs over the course of the novel, Parker deftly reveals the unexpected fallout of her main character’s activities. For example, one man turns dangerously aggressive, and at another point, her growing feelings for someone distract her from her mission. The author treats the topic of infidelity seriously throughout, but she does allow for moments of humor. One of the best sequences in the book involves Bree’s stay at a lamentable Nevada motel, where she deals with cold temperatures and a blaring TV. This novel is the start of a planned series, and, as such, it ends on an effective cliffhanger.
A diverting tale featuring a protagonist with an atypical job.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-5255-3365-5
Page Count: 258
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2018
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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