A heartwarming and wholesome commentary on the importance of human connection.
A debut novel follows a young woman who comes to terms with her mother’s death by joining a community therapy group.
Gracie Anderson, this tale’s protagonist, agrees to join a support group at the local community center when her best friend, Chloe, insists it’ll be a great place to meet guys. As it turns out, Chloe has signed Gracie up to attend a women’s-only group. And the only thing Gracie, an accomplished college professor, has in common with these women is her dead mother. Gracie feels sure she does not belong in this haphazard crew, which includes a dominatrix, a librarian, a fashion consultant, and a homemaker. Reluctantly giving the support group a chance, Gracie finds that the women’s shared status as motherless daughters is sufficient to start a legitimate bonding process. Even better, the fashion consultant has a superhot twin brother, so there might be a guy to meet after all. As Gracie gets to know each of the women in her group and finally starts dealing with the grief she has harbored for years, she also begins an exciting courtship with Jack Bradshaw, the handsome twin. Unfortunately, just as the romance starts to flourish, Gracie’s childhood sweetheart, Sam Patterson, shows up, insisting that he’s finally ready to commit to her. As her relationships with these two suitors grow uncomfortably complicated, Gracie relies on her new friends from the therapy group to help her wade through the confusing love triangle. Thanks to many refreshing twists throughout this comical story, Reynolds avoids predictability and keeps the reader guessing until the end as to which man will ultimately win Gracie’s heart. Told in chatty, accessible prose, reminiscent of Liane Moriarty and Emily Giffin, Reynolds’ story draws the reader in by combining the hefty topic of debilitating grief with many lighthearted, nearly slapstick moments centered on friendship and romance. The author provides an in-depth look at the coping mechanisms used by motherless daughters and the potential effectiveness of human interaction in dealing with despair. This tale turns out to be an appealing beach read with a little meat on its bones.
A heartwarming and wholesome commentary on the importance of human connection.Pub Date: Dec. 31, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5320-0676-0
Page Count: 404
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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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