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
A strongly plotted thriller about a plague-like epidemic on a space station. Superb research lifts Gerritsen to the top of the ladder as Michael Crichton and Robin Cook wave from below. Gerritsen’s tale doesn—t have the mystical touch that Stanislaw Lem would have added, though the essential mystery here is a fairly mystical monster, a multicellular microscopic organism called the Chimera. A geologist, trapped in a submersible 19,000 feet deep in the Gal†pagos Rift, ties in with an outbreak on mankind’s first internationally built space station (ISS), orbiting earth. The ISS, five years in the assembling and twice as long as a football field, is manned by an international team of scientists whose work, in part, focuses on testing the effects of weightlessness on microbes and viruses. When tested on earth, such cultures can grow only on flat slides. In space, without gravity, they grow three-dimensionally and assume unbounded shapes. Someone has hoodwinked the space doctors by having them test an absolutely unknown organism that has been lifted from bubbling thermals on the ocean floor. This creature has hideous properties that allow it to take on the DNA of any host it enters, be such lab mouse, frog, or human. Thus, any vaccine that might kill the amazing Chimera, whose DNA is part frog, part mouse, and part human, would kill the host as well. The story builds to a Liebestodt of dancing horror as fatal globules of infected blood erupt weightlessly from the dying, float about the ship, and clog the air filters. Meanwhile, the main romantic interest turns on a couple in the process of divorce, astronauts Emma Watson and Dr. Jack McCallum. Doc Gerritsen (Bloodstream, 1998, etc.), a former internist who creates chilling viral disasters, knows all the natural gates and alleys of the human bio-novel as well as she does the musculature of suspense.
Pub Date: Aug. 17, 1999
ISBN: 0-671-01678-4
Page Count: 331
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
Great fun, and with a few poignant moments too.
Nantucket in summer, four chummy couples, romantic intrigue and a possible murder, in the latest from Hilderbrand (A Summer Affair, 2008, etc.).
The book opens with the death of Greg and Tess MacAvoy. Sailing from Nantucket to Martha’s Vineyard for their 12th anniversary, the beloved couple is found drowned, trapped under their boat. Ed Kapenash, Nantucket Chief of Police and one of Greg’s best friends, has to break the news to his wife Andrea, Tess’s cousin. They are joined in mourning by rich, cultured Addison Wheeler; his wife Phoebe, a pill-popping zombie since her twin’s death on 9/11; wild Delilah Drake (in love with Greg); and her stoic husband Jeff. Inseparable for years, the four couples loved and respected each other, vacationed together, watched each other’s children; in fact, they seemed to have an idyllic life of friendship on the island—until the death of Greg and Tess uncovers all their dirty secrets. The toxicology report finds heroin in the bloodstream of sweet, overcautious Tess, a kindergarten teacher and doting mother of twins. Ed also finds five phone calls on Tess’s phone from Addison the morning of the sail. Were the MavAvoys’ deaths an accident or a murder plot gone wrong? Much of the mystery hinges on what happened between Greg, a music teacher at the local high school, and April Peck, a student who several months earlier accused him of sexual misconduct. With a few strings pulled by Ed, Greg’s career was saved, but the strain of the scandal has unforeseen consequences on the surviving friends. In mourning, each feels somehow culpable; slowly they confront together the sordid underbelly of their seemingly respectable lives. If the plot becomes a bit stretched at the end, never mind: Hilderbrand has a master’s touch at characterization, making the novel’s players seem so familiar that the revelation of their secrets is irresistible.
Great fun, and with a few poignant moments too.Pub Date: July 7, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-316-04389-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
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