A lighthearted novel with some interesting tidbits about chemistry and attraction and a clever criticism of how technology...
A novel about the complexities of relationships, the nature of romantic chemistry and dating in the digital age.
At the center of Diersen’s debut novel is Wisconsin-based advice columnist Roxanne Browne, who dispenses her wisdom via a syndicated column. One day, Roxanne receives a letter asking for her advice regarding online dating. Unversed in the world of Internet relationships, she decides to delve headfirst into investigating that world—particularly one site, thematchcafe.com, which distinguishes itself by claiming to use a science-based system to “match members based on common values and other key components of compatibility.” Roxanne decides to test its science via a simple plan: Both she and her beloved husband, Walker, will join the site, fill out personality surveys, then wait to be paired as a match. All does not go according to plan, however; she and Walker, happily married and with excellent chemistry, are not deemed a compatible pair—a result that launches an even deeper investigation into the site’s method of calculating compatibility. Roxanne recruits Walker to help; he’ll go on blind dates with several women the site has deemed to be good matches for him, then report on their actual, in-person compatibility. What ensues are several hilarious dates, lots of critical analysis and even more uncertainty about what makes two people the perfect pair. Within an amusing framework, Diersen’s entertaining book explores some heavy, important themes: commitment in relationships, different types of attraction, and the biological and psychological factors behind chemistry. Diersen includes many rich, well-developed, likable characters, including Alethia Dornquast, Roxanne’s narcissistic friend with an overinflated ego, and Bunny and Mack, her loving if cartoonish parents who are compared to Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. However, she also includes the tales of several characters not directly related to the book’s plot, and the lengths of those stories and their level of detail often distract from the novel’s actual narrative. For example, Chapter 6 features an in-depth story about Renee, a former client of Roxanne’s, and her abusive relationship, which lasts for more than 10 pages but has no direct connection to the online-dating plot. More focus on the actual characters involved in investigating thematchcafe.com would serve to make the already engaging plot more compelling.
A lighthearted novel with some interesting tidbits about chemistry and attraction and a clever criticism of how technology can connect yet disconnect two people.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0615663777
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Blue Gentian Books
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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