Like a slice of a favorite dessert, thoroughly enjoyable, but gone too soon.
Two peculiar loners bond over the culinary arts in this debut novel.
Fresh out of L’Ecole Gastronomique, the enthusiastic and frizzy-haired Alexandra “Lexie” Haynes scores a coveted gig as a private chef at Frederick House, an isolated, country estate. The catch? Her client, John Frederick, is…particular. A man of ample proportions, he rarely leaves his bedroom, communicates via handwritten notes, and owns every volume of Bon Appétit dating back to 1955. It’s a precarious employment, to say the least. Despite a mishap that nearly gets Lexie fired, a common love of food leads the two eccentrics to forge a tentative friendship. Soon, John Frederick feels brave enough to venture into the kitchen and meet Lexie face to face (“Lexie will be making breakfast. It doesn’t matter that she has cooked breakfast every day for the past few months. Last night, he decided that this would be the first morning he would join her to eat”). But Caleb Mayfield, John Frederick’s business manager and Lexie’s could-be beau, threatens to disrupt the almost-happy home. It’s a jolly, lighthearted narrative, JoJo Moyes’ Me Before You (2012) for foodies. Gastronomic references are sprinkled throughout the prose— Lexie’s eyes are the color of “blueberry sorbet mixed with cream,” and a dashed hope is a soufflé that has collapsed. Novak is kind to her characters, poking gentle fun at their childlike qualities. Accident-prone and insecure, Lexie is an “inveterate talker to walls, trees, and other objects,” whose interactions with other people are punctuated by vivid daydreams. John Frederick’s devotion to filling his stomach is superseded only by his difficulty with coping with change, which is put to the test when medical issues force him to alter his diet. Though it could be mistaken for lazy development, the characters’ simplicity remains endearing. There is also handsome Caleb. Though an effective plot device, John Frederick’s jealousy over Caleb’s acquaintance with Lexie is a stretch, given the brevity of the two’s interactions. Between the straightforward characters and short chapters (at 134 pages, it’s a speedy read), the novel is sometimes reminiscent of a children’s book. An absolutely lovely work, but it’s more appetizer than hearty main dish.
Like a slice of a favorite dessert, thoroughly enjoyable, but gone too soon.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63152-103-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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