Strains so hard to be fun! sexy! cool! that it ends up being none of the above.
Two frustrated journalists decide that what the world needs is another vacuous magazine.
Can a book have a sense of fun and not be utterly, abysmally shallow at the same time? In this trifle from Entertainment Weekly scribe Rebecca Ascher-Walsh and Fortune editor Erik Torkells (the pair who make up the pseudonymous Tosh), the answer is a resounding no. Ascher-Walsh and Torkells’s stand-ins are Sam, who writes Hollywood profiles for an entertainment rag and Tom, the gay lifestyles editor at Profit magazine. He is chafing at the strictures of his job; she just got fired after false rumors circulated that she canoodled with Russell Crowe at a Hollywood party. Since this is not so much a novel as journalistic wish-fulfillment, the two of them dream up Bite, a high-calorie glossy magazine about, well, the usual celebrity/food/sex/fashion stuff, but even fluffier than what you’re accustomed to. Unfortunately, it takes Tosh far too long to get to this point, readers having to be assaulted first with pages and pages of Sam and Tom’s faux fabulous lives and wearying affairs of the heart. Once the magazine itself gets cranked up and a few more characters pop in to run the thing, the narrative picks up a bit of steam. But because there are seemingly no impediments to these bright young things—every article idea they throw at each other is proclaimed wonderful, and pretty much nothing stands in their way—there’s also precious little drama. What finally becomes so obnoxious is the arrogant pretense that its characters are doing something radical or even vaguely original, as though newsstands were filled with dowdy, gray-type journals on foreign affairs: “Even women’s fashion magazines were so serious—if Harper’s Bazaar ran one more piece about AIDS in Africa . . . Tom was going to puke.”
Strains so hard to be fun! sexy! cool! that it ends up being none of the above.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-7764-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Downtown Press/Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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
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