Enjoyable (and a little predictable) summer fare.
Three Southern Belles wreak havoc in the lives of their cheating husbands in this light, likable debut.
Good manners and good breeding are one and all in small town Ithaca, Ga., making it hard for a lady to get a little breathing room. That’s what wild child Eadie Boone has been fighting for all her life. Eadie, who spent her childhood in a trailer park and now shares an antebellum mansion with husband Trevor Boone, is blindsided when he announces plans to marry his secretary. Trevor’s sanctimonious law partner Charles Broadwell, meanwhile, has no intention of leaving his little wife—he’s spent too long browbeating meek Nita (who is secretly addicted to the raunchiest of romance novels) to train someone new. And finally there is Lavonne; oblivious that husband Leonard (third partner in the prestigious Boone and Broadwell law firm) is hiding his assets to better swindle her when he gets around to filing for divorce. One night after the firm’s annual garden party, the three friends discover that their husbands’ yearly hunting trip to Montana has included the comfort of call girls. They decide on revenge, and so unfurls a complicated plan requiring female impersonators, the sale of house and goods and Ithaca’s best wives-only divorce attorney. For Eadie, this is a bittersweet scheme, because though Trevor has cheated on her (and she on him), the two are as perfect together as any couple could be. And while Lavonne could care less about leaving shlumpy old Leonard, it is proper Nita who surprises all by falling in love with Jimmy Lee Motes, a sexy young carpenter. Though the novel has its fair share of conventional devices (of our heroines, one is wild, one sensible, one shy) and uplifting female bonding, it also has some genuinely hilarious moments (particularly during the lawyers ill-fated hunting trip) and characters that would make good friends.
Enjoyable (and a little predictable) summer fare.Pub Date: May 16, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-6367-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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