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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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