Brittle romance laced with bitchy asides.
Young things in London, in Potter’s first US publication.
Juliet is bright, pretty, and disenchanted with boyfriend Will. He’s kept her waiting for eons at this bar, and she’s extremely unhappy about it. And no one ever told her that adult life would entail one second of unhappiness. Perhaps a whiny gabfest with chum Trudy will soothe her soul. Or she can text-message everyone she knows to help her through this latest crisis. Dressing up in sexy red silk embroidered with tiny flowers (don’t ask the price, darling) and attracting the attention of every bloke in the bar is small consolation for being stood up. She loathes bars. Bars serve martinis, and martinis contain olives, and even though she isn’t having a martini with or without olives, she hates olives with a passion. Nasty bitter bloody things. And just because Will is terribly involved with his new landscaping business is no reason to neglect her romantic needs. Now, he’s apparently forgotten that it’s Valentine’s Day, and she will never, ever forgive him. Not even after she gets sloppy drunk with Trudy and meets a handsome stranger in the public loo—well, she had to pee and headed into the Gents, all right? The stranger was kind enough to pass her the toilet paper, and she was not too drunk to notice that his accent was extremely posh, as in Royal Family posh! Oo! Though, as it turns out, he answers to the distinctly plebian name of Sykes, he’s the creative director of a rival ad firm, drives a jazzy, spanking-new Aston Martin and—uh-oh, Will just woke up. So who’s the GQ-gorgeous bloke in the poncey clothes sniffing around his Juliet? Will goes back to gloomy Yorkshire to sulk and Juliet jets off to sunny Italy with Sykes. He’s sophisticated, fun, has heaps of money, and showers her with expensive gifts. Most of all, he’s paying attention to her. Alas, Juliet soon realizes she’s just another notch on his Gucci belt. Sadder but wiser, she returns to England for a half-baked happy ending.
Brittle romance laced with bitchy asides.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7434-7032-X
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Downtown Press/Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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