An earnest, if somewhat underdeveloped, antidote to chick-lit.
The author of Prep (2005) goes a second round, to report on the romantic misadventures of a hapless, often clueless, young woman.
When it comes to love, Hannah Gavener is a late-bloomer. She’s in college before she goes on her first date, and she accepts the advances of the first young man to approach her not because she’s attracted to him but because she’s too surprised to say no. Thus, the slightly too-sensitive Mike is her introduction to the often disappointing, always confounding world of couplehood. Next up is Oliver, a charming Kiwi who is quite incapable of fidelity. And then there’s Henry. After one conversation, Hannah is convinced that Henry is her soulmate. Years pass, and they lose touch, but when they meet up again, Henry talks Hannah into moving to Chicago, where he lives. She soon discovers, though, that Henry failed to mention his girlfriend. Still, she knows that she and Henry are meant to be together, so she settles into a lopsided, torturous non-relationship, one that could have continued interminably if not for the unplanned pregnancy of Henry’s girlfriend. This bit of reality jolts Hannah from her obsession and propels her on a course of self-fulfillment, which she finds not with the man of her dreams but as a teacher at a school for autistic boys. That Hannah’s happy ending is a rewarding job rather than a Prince Charming is a refreshing departure from the romantic resolution offered by most fiction written about and for young women, and it’s to Sittenfeld’s credit that she refrains from giving her heroine a makeover or putting her on a diet. Nevertheless, this novel doesn’t quite satisfy. Sittenfeld seldom delves below the surface of the action, and everything that happens in Chicago is narrated as a letter by Hannah to her therapist. It’s a distilled, distant version of events, almost as if Sittenfeld was loath to dwell on this embarrassing episode in her heroine’s life. As a psychological matter, this is understandable—Hannah really is a world-class sap where Henry is concerned—but, at the formal level, it’s disappointing.
An earnest, if somewhat underdeveloped, antidote to chick-lit.Pub Date: May 23, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-6476-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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