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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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