Dunlop’s attempt to combine the tone of Patricia Highsmith with the cast of Sex and the City comes across as rancid, not...
A social-climbing sociopath from Michigan manipulates rich Manhattan relatives—and everyone else—to get what she wants in Dunlop’s second novel (Losing the Light, 2015, etc.).
Laila is a 23-year-old dental hygienist in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, engaged to marry the dentist she works for. Her father died years earlier, and she doesn't know much about his side of the family. When her mother dies, Laila's paternal cousins show up at the funeral, and she's thrilled to discover that they're wealthy New Yorkers—twins Nora and Leo and their older sister, Liberty. Two years later, divorced from her husband, she moves to New York. She's found a stash of letters to her mother from her paternal grandfather that implies an affair between them, which might explain Laila’s parents’ banishment to the hinterlands before her birth. Now Laila wants to reconnect with her family, and family money. Slightly dim Nora invites her to stay in her Tribeca penthouse. Laila is happy to be Nora’s “Pygmalion-like project,” complete with a new wardrobe from Bergdorf Goodman. Former model Liberty, more serious and intellectual and less social than her siblings, finds Laila an internship at the prominent literary agency where she works. Knowing she’s beautiful, Laila makes the most of it. She dumps the famous novelist who falls madly in love with her and heads to Mustique with a ruthless British billionaire who sends her packing when she gets drunk with some hippie strangers. Meanwhile she has a series of tawdry sexual encounters with Cameron, Liberty's best friend's brother, who is also carrying on a very proper courtship with Liberty, encounters that don’t end after Laila moves in with real estate mogul’s son Blake Katz (a too-obvious take on Jared Kushner). For a self-described “skilled chameleon,” Laila makes a lot of self-destructive decisions.
Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5598-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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