Melodramatic romance that rewards readers in for the long haul.
In this debut novel, a Texas woman reminisces about her past loves.
In 2003, an old friend drops by while Cherie, the owner of an antiques shop in Galveston, Texas, waits for a delivery. Loud, outspoken Delilah knows some of Cherie’s secrets, including that Cherie once worked as a waitress/dancer at the Jewel Box, a topless club in Houston. When the mahogany bar from the Jewel Box finally arrives at the shop, it triggers an extended flashback that consumes the bulk of the narrative. In 1968, desperate to earn money to care for her toddler, newly divorced Cherie agrees to join her friend Kat at the Jewel Box. A small-town girl, Cherie is so petrified of this new venture that she vomits in the car on the way. She adjusts, though, and befriends the bar’s manager, Beau, who offers her sensible, fatherly advice and book recommendations. At the club, Cherie also meets Gabe, an unhappily married carpenter and her polar opposite. He’s quiet; she’s chatty. He’s rude; she strives to be ladylike. After their first kiss, she falls for him. During the next 30 years, the two experience an intense on-again, off-again relationship. In attempts to move on, both intermittently become involved with other people over the years. Liberal use of references to current events and pop culture keeps the book firmly tethered to the time period, and most secondary characters, particularly Cherie’s daughter and Gabe’s mother, feel fully developed. Yet, although scenes at the club are usually vivid, later pages feel superficial and rushed in an attempt to cover 30 years in 300 pages. Especially in the early pages, the dialogue-heavy narrative sometimes relies on artificial-sounding conversations to move the plot or impart descriptions—“You’re five foot three and I’m five seven”—though later pages contain some delightful gems: “I loved doing his laundry and folded his socks and underwear as though they were the shroud of Turin.” The story contains some crude language but, given its early topless-club setting, surprisingly few extended sex scenes. Nonetheless, the neatly done happily-ever-after ending should satisfy romance readers.
Melodramatic romance that rewards readers in for the long haul.Pub Date: March 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481107150
Page Count: 308
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
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.
