Berta’s (Friday Night Chicas, not reviewed) Latin-flavored chick-lit leaves no cliché unused.
A Latina’s hope for love and success is hampered by an obligation to look after her party-girl stepsisters.
For Cynthia “Cyn” Lopez, living and working with Ami and Lila Solas, her twin stepsisters, has lost its charms. Sure, the girls have a certain supermodel glamour and cool jobs as on-air veejays for RTV, a music television station, but these “Devil Divas” treat their sister like a glorified maid, demanding that she fetch lattes and clean up messes. The only reason Cyn, 24, actually tolerates these ugly-on-the-inside creatures is to honor the last wish of her dying father—that she keep the family together, at least until she turns 25. At that point Cyn will inherit the bulk of his fortune—provided her stepmother doesn’t spend it all. Cyn has no choice but to tolerate the twin’s abuse. She does, however, enjoy hanging out at the station and proves to have such a knack for the business that the studio manager makes her an honorary (unpaid) Program Director, allowing her to come up with ideas. As for romance, Cyn’s long-dormant social life gets a lift when she meets a cute guy at Starbucks. Believing Eric to be a working stiff, and rightfully worried that predatory Lila and Ami will either scare or steal him away, she keeps her family history secret from her new beau. Turns out, though, that princely Eric is actually EJ Sandoval, CEO of AmerCon, a media conglomerate set to purchase RTV. Confusion ensues, the twins find out about Cyn’s relationship with Eric and “fire” her shortly before an important music-awards ceremony that Cyn had planned. It is then up to Cyn to try to make it right with Eric. So with help from the station’s flamboyant makeup artist and self-proclaimed “fairy godmother,” the newly delectable Cyn shows up at the event clad in a Valentino gown and, of course, crystal-heeled stilettos.
Berta’s (Friday Night Chicas, not reviewed) Latin-flavored chick-lit leaves no cliché unused.Pub Date: April 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-34172-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
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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