Not laugh-out-loud funny but an amusing look at a romance between a clueless guy and the beautiful, strong woman who loves...
by Bob Boog ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 31, 2017
An autobiographical novel chronicles a real estate agent’s quest to find true love.
In January 2011, 20-something Bob is driving to a real estate caravan with his colleague and friend Joel Watkins when he decides he is fed up with one-night stands and shallow relationships and wants to search for the love of his life. Many realtor open houses feature free meals or giveaways; this one offers psychic readings by the agent’s grandmother. Psychic Mary predicts that Bob’s soul mate will be a dark, exotic woman whom she describes as a tiger. Several months later, Bob meets a beautiful Guatemalan in a nightclub in downtown Los Angeles. Roxanne (who works for a domestic agency and initially tells Bob her name is Sofie) insists he prove his Roman Catholicism by taking her to Mass. But once he passes that test, their relationship progresses quickly. As predicted by Mary, Roxanne is a tiger who puts up with little of Bob’s nonsense. Still, he wonders if she is “The One.” Finally, he accompanies her on a business meeting—in which she represents two Hispanic domestics after checks from their famous, rich employer bounce—and experiences his much-anticipated epiphany. Not only is she “The One,” but he is not entirely sure what she sees in him—something readers will likely wonder from their first meeting. In real estate broker, songwriter, and author Boog’s (The Real Estate Rookie, 2017, etc.) humorous tale, Bob and his sidekick Joel sometimes act immature, which may annoy some readers—for example, their ongoing gag involves whether Bob, sight unseen, would “do” a woman. In addition, Bob’s dating rules—which eliminate from consideration blondes, the unemployed, and women who live with their parents or in places too far away—could raise a few hackles. But part of Bob’s charm in this entertaining story is his unabashed quasi-stupidity, which Roxanne is all too willing to point out to him. Perhaps deliberately, as a way for the author to show his love for his wife, on whom Roxanne is undoubtedly based, “The One” emerges as the far more intriguing character, while Bob is a bit of a buffoon who has a way with words.
Not laugh-out-loud funny but an amusing look at a romance between a clueless guy and the beautiful, strong woman who loves him.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9666130-6-3
Page Count: 174
Publisher: ths international
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
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. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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