A hasty erotic thriller that needs fleshing out.
An enterprising lawyer and his wife set up a blackmail ring on a tropical island known for amorous vacationing.
Tom O’Connor can’t survive much longer in New York City–his business is going under, his credit cards are maxed out and no new accounts are on the horizon. After taking a soul-searching vacation on the island of Bohana and witnessing the sexual spectacle of a native festival, he and his beautiful wife Amy contrive a plan to profile and blackmail wealthy tourists who come to the island for the sex trade. These wealthy men, pillars of the community at home, submit to their most base desires while on Bohana, and Tom is positive he can bilk them in return for staying quiet. Tom and Amy begin an organization devoted to electronically surveilling tourists and training a stable of beautiful native women to seduce the men. After sending the tourists pictures and firsthand accounts of the trysts and threatening to ruin the men’s good names, the O’Connors plan to reap the benefits of their work, receiving hefty bribes. Stepping into their net are Hollywood moviemakers and childhood friends Vic and Larry. Each has ties at home, but reluctantly become involved with island women on the island from the O’Connors’ blackmailing organization. Little does O’Connor know that these men have a history of foiling bigger and stronger opponents, and won’t let a group of criminals hijack their reputations. They hatch a plan to strike back against the blackmailers, employing their wits against the organization’s muscle. Along the way, Vic and Larry must contend with jealous girlfriends, the loss of the island sheriff and the FBI. The action in the plot is unrelenting, but never particularly suspenseful. The timeline of the action is also difficult to follow, with jumps in time that aren’t clearly explained. For an erotic novel, the sex scenes are few and far between, and not expansive enough to engage the reader. The premise of the book is unique, and the characters’ motivation, especially Tom’s desperation, is well-drawn. However, the writing is largely tedious and will have readers looking for a more fulfilling encounter.
A hasty erotic thriller that needs fleshing out.Pub Date: May 10, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4196-9451-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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