A likable beach read with just a touch of gravitas.
Delinsky, whose bestsellers tackle the crises of family life, offers a story of growth for a woman and her adult daughter and the resulting painful divide.
Caroline MacAfee is head carpenter for MacAfee Homes and host of the popular home-improvement show Gut It!, which chronicles the company's building projects. The company is a family affair, run by patriarch Theodore; Caroline's ex-husband, Roy; their architect daughter, Jamie; and her fiance, Brad, the company's lawyer. Caroline avoids Roy and his young third wife, Jess, and their toddler, Tad, preferring the wood shop to the boardroom. But then the producer of Gut It! drops a bombshell—Caroline is being replaced as host by Jamie. Caroline is furious, feeling she's the victim of ageism, and irrationally blames Jamie for orchestrating her own promotion. Heartbroken Jamie adores her mother and doesn't want to host the show, at least not like this. But suddenly this conflict becomes much less relevant when Roy and Jess are killed in a car accident and Jamie is given custody of Tad, her half brother. Grieving and overwhelmed, Jamie has just a few days to learn the trick of being a working mother. (Brad is no help, suggesting Tad be given, like an old potato, to someone else.) As her mother is still not speaking to her, Jamie begins to rely on Chip Kobik, a hunky dad and former NHL bad boy she meets at the park. He helps her navigate life with Tad and realize what real love looks like. Meanwhile, as the new CEO, the often unsympathetic Caroline softens while keeping company with her longtime friend Dean, the company's general contractor and a surprisingly romantic tough guy. Delinsky effortlessly brings the components together—romance, career shifts, changes in parent-child relationships—and if the novel becomes occasionally clunky detailing an architect at work or a real estate deal in action, then the two charming romances make up for it.
A likable beach read with just a touch of gravitas.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-00704-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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