Nick’s mother gets kind of forgotten, but the hero is irresistible: romantic, respectful, and cheerfully...
Funny, juicy sequel to Ever After (2001, not reviewed).
Not quite over Jasmine, the woman of his dreams who dumped him in Ever After, Nick leaves Chicago to sit on the beach in San Diego and watch girls, when not heading up to LA for auditions, since he wants to act. Getting married? Well, some of his player friends just did, but getting his heart broken by the fiercely independent Jasmine taught him to be more cautious. Later, though, when his beloved mother is diagnosed with cancer—given two years to live—Nick’s priorities change in a heartbeat: he’s got to marry a good woman before his mother dies. When his friend Craig offers Nick a chance to write an anonymous column on the dating wars for a San Diego giveaway newspaper, Nick jumps at it, titling it “One Man’s Quest To Be Married In A Year” and signing it “Marriage Minded.” He begins his research at a wedding where—as fate would have it—he catches the bride’s garter. He then proceeds to date every sexy black or Latina female (or mix thereof) he runs into in a rakish, often hilarious series of erotic and platonic misadventures interspersed with a fair amount of from-the-heart philosophizing from the network of brothas he keeps in touch with all over the country. A gorgeous actress, a nurse, an obliging stripper, a WEMP or two (Women With Emotional and Mental Problems)—all provide material for his column. Soon women everywhere are clamoring to meet “Marriage Minded,” but he goes public only when he falls in love at last, with acclaimed poet and rapper Tabitha. Publicity about their impending marriage reaches the suddenly jealous Jasmine, who shows up at the wedding, kisses him into insensibility, and demands that he choose! Installment three coming up.
Nick’s mother gets kind of forgotten, but the hero is irresistible: romantic, respectful, and cheerfully dirty-minded—sometimes all at once.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50637-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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