by Bob Strauss ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 13, 2013
A colorful story of relationships and how they change their participants’ perspectives on love.
A renowned psychotherapist helps people find paths back to love and begins to search for his own fulfillment in this debut novel.
Strauss allows the nuances and idiosyncrasies of a couple’s new relationship to unfold as they unknowingly confide in the same psychotherapist. Dr. Harry Salinger, who touts himself as a guru on relationships, espouses advice that he realizes he might do well to take himself. As he witnesses Jennifer’s and Jacques’ differing perspectives on their relationship, he starts to recognize the void in his own love life and the fact that he’s shut himself off from the possibility of spontaneous love. As he meets with Jennifer and Jacques individually, all three slowly transform into more open, trusting people. But as the relationship ebbs and flows, new conflicts emerge and trust begins to break down. When Jacques and Jennifer discover that they’ve both been seeing the same therapist—and that Salinger didn’t bother to disclose this—the book takes a sharp turn. Each character has to learn what it means to endure a relationship once the honeymoon phase is over and real feelings are at stake. Strauss delivers a fine book about parallel relationships that’s never tedious, thanks in part to sharp dialogue; at one point, for example, Jennifer describes having sex with Jacques as “making love to a hurricane.” With sharp dialogue and descriptive, hilarious dating and sex scenes, Strauss shows the world of Jennifer and Jacques as one of uncertainty, amusement, confusion and fun. The book crescendos with each character facing a choice to either stay open and take risks or to deny true love.
A colorful story of relationships and how they change their participants’ perspectives on love.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-1491709801
Page Count: 260
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Share your opinion of this book
by Percival Everett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 21, 2001
More genuine and tender than much of Everett's previous work, but no less impressive intellectually: a high point in an...
Desperation outstrips the satire in Everett's latest exercise in narrative wizardry (Glyph, 1999, etc.), as a lonely African-American writer faces private torment and instant fame when his parody of ghetto literature is taken as the real deal.
His own generation's version of an invisible man, Thelonious Ellison, a.k.a. Monk, is a largely unknown academic novelist who visits hometown Washington, D.C., to give a paper and see his mother and sister. No sooner does he return to California than Sis, a doctor in an abortion clinic, is shot dead at work. Someone has to take care of Mom, who's showing the first wrenching signs of Alzheimer's, so Monk returns home. There, his frustration with a runaway bestseller written in ghettospeak by a bourgeois black woman after visiting Harlem for a couple of days is fueled by endless rejections of his own new manuscript; in a rage he pumps out a parody and sends it under a pseudonym to his agent—who promptly secures a six-figure advance and a seven-figure movie deal. Stunned that no one recognizes his book as a send-up, Monk refuses to let his true identity be known. Meanwhile, he must cope with his mother's rapid decline, his gay brother's sudden animosity, and the discovery among his father's papers of letters indicating not only that Dad had a white mistress long ago, but that Monk has a half-sister his age. Struggling to maintain his own identity as his creation looms larger than life and his family redefines itself, he makes choices that render him invisible no more.
More genuine and tender than much of Everett's previous work, but no less impressive intellectually: a high point in an already substantial literary career.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2001
ISBN: 1-58465-090-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
Share your opinion of this book
More About This Book
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Cormac McCarthy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 2, 2006
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Awards & Accolades
Our Verdict
GET IT
National Book Critics Circle Finalist
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
Share your opinion of this book
More by Cormac McCarthy
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
More About This Book
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.