A new take on the May-December romance, perfect for fans of unexpected gifts.
A debut novel about a middle-aged woman who has an extramarital affair with a much younger man.
Eve is a 48-year-old suburban garden designer who passes her time foraging for lost treasure in consignment shops. Her marriage has become a cold and tiresome shadow of what it once was, her adult son is long gone, and her husband barely speaks to her. As the book opens, Eve discovers an exotic but badly damaged musical instrument in a secondhand store. As she's leaving the establishment with her new find, she bumps into her late brother's best friend from childhood and the old friend’s 28-year-old son, Micajah. Much to Eve’s surprise, Micajah, a handsome musician, seems to be flirting with her. He takes her number, promising to connect her with a man who might be able to repair the unusual instrument she's just bought. When he follows up days later, Eve still can’t decide whether he's interested in her or if she's imagining the attraction. When the pair meet up to “discuss the instrument,” Eve’s doubts are put to bed. Suddenly, she's caught in a whirlwind affair with this man, who’s not only part of a different generation, but who inhabits a social stratosphere saturated with drugs, sensuality, and a mysterious darkness. As someone who seeks out art and adventure, Micajah provides much-needed excitement for Eve, but the closer she grows to him, the more frightening his intense emotions become. As she explores physical pleasures, Eve struggles to determine how she feels about her aging body and her deteriorating marriage. In fast-paced but thoughtful prose, Huston (Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found, 2009) challenges traditional assumptions about relationships and shows beauty being discovered in unlikely places.
A new take on the May-December romance, perfect for fans of unexpected gifts.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7783-3071-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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