Trashy and trite.
Kerlin and Oh treat readers to plenty of sex, drugs and stilettos in their splashy debut offering a peek into the lives of Heidi Klum wannabes.
Discovered by a photographer in her small Virginia hometown, Heather Johnston soon gets the call from a New York agency and leaves behind her simple middle-class family to join the high-flying elite. While trying to land a major modeling campaign and score some big bucks, she must pay her dues by living in “the model dorm,” a cramped apartment packed with fresh model meat. For the agency, it’s a way to keep costs low until the new girls land lucrative contracts. The whiny prima donnas consider bunk beds in a one-bedroom share subhuman treatment. Heather hooks up with her leggy roommates to escape the shabby apartment and hunt for free booze and wealthy men. But she isn’t like the others, the author assures us: Heather also likes art, and she toys with the idea of abandoning her model dreams to become an art-history student. This manufactured conflict doesn’t interfere much with the authors’ mission to reveal the trade’s Dark Secrets—all those models who claim to eat three square meals a day are lying through their whitened teeth!—nor does it spoil the juicy fun of watching the girls stab each other in the back to score hot European club promoters and choice modeling jobs. Former teen model Kerlin, now a college sophomore, makes a point (with former model-dorm roommate Oh) of showing that there’s work involved in becoming a successful model: Glory awaits those who trade dancing on the tables at Bungalow 8 for time on the treadmill. The authors’ prose matches their clichéd nostrums. If Kerlin did indeed write any of this, she might want to consider adding an expository writing course to her class schedule . . . and find a coauthor whose credentials go beyond “lifestyle marketing.”
Trashy and trite.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2007
ISBN: 0-7432-9826-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
