A lusty adventure story that entertains but only skims the surface of its midlife tribulations.
In Dye’s debut erotic romance, a middle-age woman risks it all to reconnect to her libido.
Linda Levy, a high school English teacher at an inner-city Philadelphia high school, is fast approaching her 50th birthday, and she finds this hard to accept. Linda’s life is conventional and comfortable; she has a loyal husband, a job she loves, two children in college, and a close friend with whom she plays bridge. Despite all this, she finds herself feeling restless in her life, believing that the age of 50 represents “the stepping-stone to the old-age home.” One evening after bridge club at her friend’s apartment building, Linda walks out to the parking lot and discovers that her car has a flat tire. She returns to the apartment building’s front office for help, where she encounters a titillating surprise: Fred Kunkle, the young night manager, who looks like “Brad Pitt’s handsomer brother.” Much to Linda’s astonishment, he starts flirting with her. She soon learns that’s he’s an independent filmmaker and photographer, and in their next encounter, he invites her to his apartment so that he can take her picture. Soon, what began as a harmless crush escalates into a full-blown affair. Throughout the novel, readers watch as Linda struggles to reconcile the thrill of sex with a younger man with the sweet life that she shares with her loving husband. This tension effectively drives the novel, and Dye keeps the reader in the dark about which life Linda will choose, or which life will choose her, until the very end. Meanwhile, the author also builds suspense around Fred’s identity—a web of lies that unravels as the affair escalates. The narrator’s cutesy sense of humor detracts from the suspense, however. Indeed, Linda’s frequent one-liners make for rushed comic relief during emotionally fraught moments, suggesting that she lacks the ability to fully experience the gravity of her infidelity.
A lusty adventure story that entertains but only skims the surface of its midlife tribulations.Pub Date: April 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5320-1835-0
Page Count: 150
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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