Predictable Devil Wears Prada clone.
In Clark’s debut novel, an ambitious young editor is stretched to the limit when she takes a job with a monstrous book-publishing diva. (N.B.: The author once worked for book-publishing diva Judith Regan.)
When her fatherly mentor, Jackson Mayville, retires, 26-year-old Claire Truman realizes it’s time to move on, as much as she has enjoyed her rewarding, if underpaid, stint at a top-tier New York publishing company. The same day Jackson gives her the news, she runs into an old college crush, Randall Cox, who gets her an interview with Vivian Grant, the stunning publisher of the high-profile and extremely lucrative Grant Books. Amazingly, Vivian hires Claire on the spot, offering to triple her current salary, in an offer that only seems too good to be true. The catch is that Vivian is a raving she-devil, with a horrible reputation for verbal abuse, unfair demands and capricious behavior. She is also carrying on an illicit affair with a married city official and prone to graphic descriptions of her own sex life. But in spite of all the warnings from her colleagues, Claire takes the gig, reasoning that if she holds out for a year she will learn a ton, and be poised for great things. And for a time, through dedication and luck, Claire remains in Vivian’s good graces, while embarking on a romance with financier Randall, who she ends up moving in with and getting engaged to. She also acquires a novel by Jackson’s talented nephew Luke, a sweet guy who seems a much better fit for Claire than the workaholic mama’s boy she’s with. Needless to say, Claire’s resolve to stay at Grant Books is repeatedly tested, with Vivian viciously lashing out at her in public, pitting her against another editor and threatening to pull the plug on Luke’s book. Vivian’s self-absorbed malevolence reaches its lowest (and least believable) point when she interrupts Claire’s wedding day to talk business. That Vivian never rises above caricature is a disappointment. Funny in parts, especially in the gleeful anarchy of some of Vivian’s more sociopathic rants, this boss-from-hell derivative closes with a rather conventional love triangle.
Predictable Devil Wears Prada clone.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2007
ISBN: 0-446-57924-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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