An uneven erotic tale.
A young woman becomes drawn to an attractive, wealthy, and dominant man in this debut novel.
Beautiful Evelyn “Eve” James, a painter, photographer, and blogger, has just moved to Boston, where her brother, Nick, a successful businessman, lives now that he is about to get married. In a park, Eve catches sight of an intriguing black-haired man, who she soon discovers is her brother’s close friend Malcolm Preston Lynch, 24, one of Boston’s most eligible bachelors. Eve can be hard to sympathize with, considering her eye-rolling disdain for the women who stalk Malcolm; she characterizes them as gold-digging bimbos. She’s unnecessarily snarky, too, criticizing commenters on her public blog for their curiosity. Up close, she’s struck by Malcolm’s gorgeous green eyes and the hurricanelike power he radiates, which sends her into over-the-top physical reactions. Malcolm hires Eve to paint his office walls and arranges outings that display his influence and wealth. Despite her love of independence, she enjoys Malcolm’s bossiness and the feelings he awakens. He appreciates Eve’s beauty and dislike of presents. Both Malcolm and Eve have painful memories that explain their difficulties with intimacy, but as the story continues, the couple’s feelings grow and find thrilling erotic expression. Eve discovers that she enjoys being pampered and exploring kinky scenarios—but will a threat from the past and a misunderstanding shake the pair’s newfound trust? In her novel, Cartwright offers standard romantic tropes: a rich, powerful man whose seeming coldness protects deep psychic wounds; a young woman who gives up her autonomy for a dominant and sexy guy, as when Eve feels she must ask permission to call Malcolm, her brother’s friend, by his first name even when speaking of him to a third party. The strong erotic scenes have heat for those who like in-charge men. But here (as elsewhere), clumsy writing can detract: “Malcolm’s hips moved, rubbing against Eve’s clitorises.” In general, the book needs a sharp editor to correct some errors involving spelling, tense, word choice, and grammar (“She almost stumbled to the ground from him powerful pull”; “I rather have a drink”).
An uneven erotic tale.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-973521-79-2
Page Count: 338
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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