Like a Bushnell character: glittery and irresistible but, likewise, ultimately unsatisfying.
From the writer of the original Sex and the City (1996), the source of the HBO series, four loosely linked stories (being marketed as a novel) about the glamorous exteriors and unfulfilled interiors of high-status, no-longer-young New Yorkers.
Starting with her New York Observer columns, Bushnell has chronicled the romantic plights of 30-ish women who look like they have everything, and spend their time trying to believe it. Here, she does a fine job of sketching her characters and portraying, both satirically and realistically, their elite social ecology (with enough of a roman à clef feel to get people talking), but the longer pieces call for greater narrative skills than Bushnell's able to muster. In “Nice N’Easy,” beautiful, cynical, gold-digger Janey Wilcox (whose situation strikingly parallels Lily Bart’s in The House of Mirth) has traded in her looks and the semi-celebrity of a once-promising modeling/acting career for a string of wealthy, unpleasant, summer boyfriends, tolerated for their luxurious Hamptons houses. A bid for independence (her own summer rental, paid for by a married Hollywood mogul plus an attempt at writing) fails, but an unexpected contract as a Victoria’s Secret model puts her back on top, and enables her to buy her own house. Likewise, in the amusing but slight “Crossing the Pond,” a blond, 40-ish, New York sex columnist travels to London in search of a husband, and leaves disappointed, only to find herself on the flight home seated next to the man she’s been looking. In grimmer scenarios, “Highlights (For Adults),” a driven, tightly wound journalist considers leaving her disappointing, less ambitious husband but, instead, both have flings and regroup; and in “Snow Angels,” Cecilia—part Princess Grace, part Princess Di—falls apart in New York and Cannes, abetted by her dangerous, Courtney Love–like, new best friend.
Like a Bushnell character: glittery and irresistible but, likewise, ultimately unsatisfying.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2000
ISBN: 0-87113-819-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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