by E. Lynn Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2008
Racy entertainment too often weighed down by clunky dialogue and overearnest moralizing.
In his mawkish but heart-tugging latest, Harris (I Say a Little Prayer, 2006, etc.) exposes the extremes to which sports agents will go to sign NFL flavors-of-the-month.
Carmyn Bledsoe has struggled to nurture her son Brady’s football talent while gradually rising from poverty to prosperity as the owner of two Atlanta beauty emporiums. But Carmyn is no “Greta Ghetto.” Born to the African-American aristocracy in Texas, she was exiled by her family after her University of Texas football-star boyfriend, Woodson, found her passed out and naked in a hotel bed and assumed the worst. Pregnant due to a rape she can’t remember, Carmyn refused to give up baby Brady. Now her hopes have almost flowered—Brady is a senior running back and Heisman candidate at (fictitious) Central Georgia University. Carmyn has always controlled Brady’s career, including insisting he remain celibate until marriage to avoid entanglements with golddiggers. Agents, including sleazebag Nico, are clamoring to rep Brady in the NFL. Nico uses Raquel, an alluring waif whom he “rescued” from her no-account New Orleans single mother, as a decoy to entice young athletes. Coming off a job where she helped Nico swindle a newly drafted NBA player out of his signing bonus, Raquel, aka Barrett, a well-preserved 29, is posing as a CGU cheerleader who’s after Brady’s virginity. After this mission, Barrett plans to retire to Nico’s opulent Buckhead mansion—as soon as he moves his wife out. Covering all angles, Nico employs Kilgore, a comely male student-impersonator, to seduce Brady’s godfather Lowell, a professor at CGU. Kilgore bugs Lowell’s house and records Carmyn’s tearful confession of Brady’s origins—she’d told Brady that his father was dead. When Barrett informs Brady that his mother lied, the filial bond is compromised.
Racy entertainment too often weighed down by clunky dialogue and overearnest moralizing.Pub Date: July 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-49272-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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