Light as a breeze and about as memorable.
Hopeless girl gets swept off feet by wealthy movie producer, only to be tempted by cute but poor actor.
There are authors who can work comfortably inside the genre, giving fresh spin to the old, tired, chick-lit conventions. If only British writer Matthews (Bare Necessity, 2003, etc.) were one of them. Her London girl of the moment, Sadie Nelson, is at loose ends. Once a trader in the City, Sadie is now reduced to a lifestyle a few steps below going on the dole. Temping at a book convention, she meets Gil McCann, a Hollywood producer who just bought the rights to a hot new novel. He’s charming, devastatingly handsome, obviously loaded, and a genuinely nice guy. Having pretty much run out her string in London, Sadie doesn’t take long to accept his invitation to come see him in California, an invite that should be the gateway to a Pretty Woman life of riches and great sex. But roadblock after roadblock gets tossed in the mad new couple’s way, from Gil’s alcohol-sodden trainwreck of a soon-to-be-ex-wife to Tavis, the simply adorable actor who’s sadly pretty poor and quite possibly gay, but seems quite smitten with Sadie nonetheless. Gil and Sadie are realistically uncomfortable with each other, only having just met, of course, but just about every other element here is as artificial as Gil’s wife’s breasts. When Sadie’s not whining internally about her situation—even though within a matter of days, she’s got herself a decent job and apartment, not to mention Gil’s penchant for buying her expensive presents when yet another of their dates goes to pot—we’ve got Gil to deal with, who’s not only far too much of a human being to be a producer but talks like a girl. Matthews has a tin ear for all dialogue, but her inability to write a male character (or any character other than a young, white British woman) is especially pronounced.
Light as a breeze and about as memorable.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-059562-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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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