A triumphant series launch with an appealing couple that’s sure to garner return readers.
A college student becomes drawn to an enigmatic man whose startling secret may be putting her in mortal danger in this supernatural-infused debut romance.
Twenty-something Gwen Adams hasn’t had a serious romantic relationship in several years. This may change when she meets Alexander Prescott, with whom she feels a connection. Alexander notices it, too, but he has his eye on Hannah Kinsley, a senator’s daughter and Gwen’s chum at Verona Beach Community College in Florida. He believes it’s his fate to be with Hannah, as she’s a dead ringer for his former love, Eva. But he can’t ignore his fondness for Gwen, who soon begins dating her close friend Kyle “Ky” Harper. When Alexander signs up for college courses to be near Hannah, he winds up in her acting class, which Gwen is likewise taking. Unexpectedly, he and Gwen earn romantically linked roles in a play, sparking steamy rehearsals and unmasked envy from Ky. But Alexander has a secluded past and is covertly working on a “mission” (details initially unknown). He suspects someone of stalking his family, including his billionaire entrepreneur father, Eli. Unfortunately, he also fears his association with Gwen could make her the culprit’s eventual target. Though it’s apparent the Prescotts are supernatural (Alexander refers to humans as distinct from his family), Westbay’s series opener centers on the couple’s romance. This involves mutual ogling, but the story gradually explores the engaging characters’ rich backgrounds. Hannah, for one, has a reason for “stealing” Gwen’s potential dates while Gwen endured a tragedy in high school. Intimate moments between Alexander and Gwen are tantalizing and, most impressively, offer little physical interaction. For example, the two, during a scene dramatization, get very close—Alexander staring “ravenously at her lips”—before the director/playwright interrupts. Readers learn early what Alexander is, but his specific origin and the “resources” he wants remain a mystery until later. The final act accommodates plot reveals and the bulk of the action, ending on a blistering cliffhanger.
A triumphant series launch with an appealing couple that’s sure to garner return readers.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9996065-0-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Quadratic Pie Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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