by Allison Hobbs & Cairo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 16, 2016
Little in the way of romance or plot, but readers who enjoy lots of raunchy sex with a confident and unapologetic female...
A classic Zane Presents novel with lots of steamy sex, complicated relationships, and over-the-top situations.
Gorgeous Arabia Knight is proud of her lifestyle as a "top shelf sidepiece trophy" of older, wealthy married men neglected by their wives. Typical of heroines written by Cairo (The Pleasure Zone, 2016) and Hobbs (No Boundaries, 2015), Arabia doesn't want love, just lust and money, and "happens to be a woman who is very comfortable in her skin, in her sexuality." So when she sees self-made millionaire Cruze Fontaine at a nightclub, she entices him with her sultry dancing, and they have a quick, hot coupling right then and there. Cruze is a playboy who doesn't get attached, yet he can't stop thinking about the mystery woman who gave him the orgasm of his life but not her name. When they do reconnect, Arabia and Cruze have a sweet rapport, even if it's usually in the midst of incredibly dirty talk and wild sex. The profane language throughout the novel will be an acquired taste for new readers. Cruze, a "young cat from the streets," is trying to rebuild his life on the right side of the law after running from a career in hustling back in Brooklyn. He owns HYPE, the Huntingdon’s Young People’s Enrichment Center, and coaches one of their basketball teams. Arabia’s materialistic and narcissistic personality overshadows Cruze’s more sedate one. She can be hard to take with her constant self-praise (she considers bottling and marketing her own "sweet nectar"), but her sisters and disparaging mother help bring her down to earth. Both Cruze and Arabia have multiple other sex partners, only sharing their feelings at the very end, which makes their sudden changes of heart a little dubious.
Little in the way of romance or plot, but readers who enjoy lots of raunchy sex with a confident and unapologetic female protagonist won't complain.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59309-672-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Strebor/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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