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
Twenty New England horror shorts by Stephen King (and a painfully lofty introduction by old pro John D. MacDonald). King, of course, is the 30-year-old zillionaire who poured the pig's blood on Carrie, woke the living dead in 'Salem's Lot, and gave a bad name to precognition in The Shining. The present collection rounds up his magazine pieces, mainly from Cavalier, and also offers nine stories not previously published. He is as effective in the horror vignette as in the novel. His big opening tale, "Jerusalem's Lot"—about a deserted village—is obviously his first shot at 'Salem's Lot and, in its dependence on a gigantic worm out of Poe and Lovecraft, it misses the novel's gorged frenzy of Vampireville. But most of the other tales go straight through you like rats' fangs. "Graveyard Shift" is about cleaning out a long unused factory basement that has a subbasement—a hideous colony of fat giant blind legless rats that are mutating into bats. It's a story you may wish you hadn't read. You'll enjoy the laundry mangle that becomes possessed and begins pressing people into bedsheets (don't think about that too much), a flu bug that destroys mankind and leaves only a beach blanket party of teenagers ("Night Surf"), and a beautiful lady vampire and her seven-year-old daughter abroad in a Maine blizzard ("One for the Road"). Bizarre dripperies, straight out of Tales from the Crypt comics. . . a leprous distillation.
Pub Date: Jan. 20, 1977
ISBN: 0385129912
Page Count: 367
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1977
BOOK TO SCREEN
Stephen King’s “Jerusalem’s Lot” to Be Epix Show
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The fine Israeli writer Yehoshua (Open Heart, 1996, etc.) makes a lengthy journey into the year 999, the end of the first millennium. Indeed, it is the idea of a great journey that is the heart of the story here. Ben Attar, a Moroccan Jewish merchant has come a long distance to France to seek out his nephew and former partner Abulafia. Ben Attar, the nephew, and a third partner, the Muslim Abu Lutfi, had once done a lucrative business importing spices and treasures from the Atlas Mountains to eager buyers in medieval Europe. But now their partnership has been threatened by a complex series of events, with Abulafia married to a pious Jewish widow who objects vehemently to Ben Attar’s two wives. Accompanied by a Spanish rabbi, whose cleverness is belied by his seeming ineffectualness; the rabbi’s young son, Abu Lutfi; the two wives; a timorous black slave boy, and a crew of Arab sailors, the merchant has come to Europe to fight for his former partnership. The battle takes place in two makeshift courtrooms in the isolated Jewish communities of the French countryside, in scenes depicted with extraordinary vividness. Yehoshua tells this complex, densely layered story of love, sexuality, betrayal and “the twilight days, [when] faiths [are] sharpened in the join between one millennium and the next” in a richly allusive, languorous prose, full of lengthy, packed sentences, with clauses tumbling one after another. De Lange’s translation is sensitively nuanced and elegant, catching the strangely hypnotic rhythms of Yehoshua’s style. As the story draws toward its tragic conclusion—but not the one you might expect—the effect is moving, subtle, at once both cerebral and emotional. One of Yehoshua’s most fully realized works: a masterpiece.
Pub Date: Jan. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-48882-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
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