Moving, funny, and warm: executive-level African-American chick lit in which love helps put the past to rest.
Perkins debuts with an engaging romance about buppies slowly confronting and ultimately healing the scars of a violent, sexually irresponsible past.
Within days of blowing into Atlanta, faded, coke-snorting basketball star Terry Stuart is dead. Did Gwen Fagan, an accountant specializing in merger acquisitions who also practices karate and packs a pistol, kill the man who viciously raped her when she was in college ten years ago? Gwen is still haunted by traumatic dreams and incapable of having an emotionally satisfying sexual relationship. After establishing that Stuart is loathsome enough to deserve an early grave, and that Gwen is certainly capable of sending him there, the author goes back a year to the beginning of an unlikely romance between Gwen and Xavier Dean, Terry’s college basketball buddy. He’s just been hired by her accounting firm and, as luck would have it, is assigned to the Gwen's acquisition team. While Xavier may have been almost as compulsive a womanizer as Stuart back in college, he’s cleaned up his act considerably since then. He’s good looking, thoughtful, professionally astute, and seemingly unswayed by the sassy talk and sexual aggressiveness of Gwen’s coworker Shayla. But Gwen can’t be sure if Xavier wasn’t the shadowy second man present when Terry raped her. Xavier, feeling her resentment, reveals that he is raising a child from his first marriage, which ended when Terry had an affair with his wife. Slowly, Gwen begins to open up. A rocky romance follows, with Gwen never quite sure how far she can trust Xavier—until the vile Terry Stuart returns to ruin both their lives.
Moving, funny, and warm: executive-level African-American chick lit in which love helps put the past to rest.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-9724562-7-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Agate
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
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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