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THE STYLIST

Name: THE STYLIST
Author: Cai Emmons
ISBN: 978-0-06-089895-3

by Cai Emmons ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2007

“Women’s fiction” of the most middling sort, and a culturally privileged exercise in navel-gazing.

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The author of His Mother’s Son (2003) ponders gender differences and layered haircuts in her second novel.

Hayden Risley is a stylist. After she runs away from her semi-patrician Connecticut family and spends a little time voluntarily homeless in California, she ends up working at a pleasantly bustling shop in New Jersey. Her quiet life is given a jolt when she befriends a transsexual, and she is shaken yet again when she must travel to Costa Rica to care for her injured—and estranged—father. Hayden is also a Harvard dropout. She takes hair very seriously, and so does this novel. The literature on salons is extensive, even including scholarly treatises on African-American beauty culture. Emmons is doggedly literary (hers may be the first book on hairstyling to contain epigrams by Paul Auster and Virginia Woolf and a reference to the work of Eugène Ionesco), and occasionally she conjures a resonant metaphor: “He touched the back of his hair gently, as women do, as if an infant slept beneath its layers.” There is much philosophizing here—on the nature of transformation, on the differences between men and women, on the necessity to tell stories, on the need for fruit- and floral-scented sanctuaries—but it’s seldom illuminating. Hayden’s mother, a delicate pre-Raphaelite Yankee, and her domineering and inaccessible father are exceedingly familiar. Although the author makes note of the class disparities between wealthy tourists and the servants who make their exotic idylls possible, she still presents the tropics as a paradise in which white people get to reinvent themselves. The novel’s greatest weakness, though, is its dull heroine. At best, she’s a blank onto which readers of her demographic—youngish and educated but not particularly intellectually curious—can project themselves.

“Women’s fiction” of the most middling sort, and a culturally privileged exercise in navel-gazing.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007

ISBN: 978-0-06-089895-3

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BELLS
by Cai Emmons

- BOOK REVIEW
UNLEASHED
by Cai Emmons

- BOOK REVIEW
VANISHING
by Cai Emmons

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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.