A surprisingly complex and realistic love story delicately narrated by an endearing protagonist.
A debut novel follows a girl’s crush as it evolves into a lifelong tale of obsession and passion.
Judith first met Elliot as a fifth grader who had recently moved to Chicago’s North Side in the mid-1950s. Then, he was just a little boy with torn trousers, but over the course of the next 60 years, Elliot would become Judith’s lover, friend, and permanent addiction. “Our relationship was a cocktail mix of rivalry and loyalty—shaken with a strong dose of passion and resentment,” Judith writes of their time as academically competitive sixth graders, which would set the tone for the decades to come. Following the suicide of Elliot’s mother, Judith consoles him while being overjoyed at their relationship’s shift into teenage romance, but college abruptly ends her dreams of a happily-ever-after. Instead, they pursue different paths, with Elliot transforming into a high-powered New York attorney and Judith becoming a divorced social worker in California. Through letters and cross-country trips, they remain in each other’s lives. But Judith always follows their unsaid agreement that she not talk about her love for him. Throughout children, divorces, and even deaths, Klasson brings the two characters together again and again with the same devastating result for Judith, who never gives up on the “man by which I had measured all other loves.” Written in the first person and addressed directly to Elliot, the novel’s prose is strikingly elegant and intimate. What could easily slide into a melodramatic tale of long-lost love turns into a realistic and psychological study of one woman’s deepest thoughts. The author also cleverly develops supporting characters through Judith’s eyes. (Judith’s eventual friendship with Elliot’s second wife and her reactions to Seth, her philandering first husband, are easily some of the narrative’s most memorable and captivating moments.) While the pace of the book’s second half slows down considerably as the two lovers move into old age and toward the bittersweet conclusion of their long journey, Klasson fills every scene she can with thought-provoking reflections on the nature of love, family, and romance.
A surprisingly complex and realistic love story delicately narrated by an endearing protagonist.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-604-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Heartfelt and funny, this enemies-to-lovers romance shows that the best things in life are all-inclusive and nontransferable...
An unlucky woman finally gets lucky in love on an all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii.
From getting her hand stuck in a claw machine at age 6 to losing her job, Olive Torres has never felt that luck was on her side. But her fortune changes when she scores a free vacation after her identical twin sister and new brother-in-law get food poisoning at their wedding buffet and are too sick to go on their honeymoon. The only catch is that she’ll have to share the honeymoon suite with her least favorite person—Ethan Thomas, the brother of the groom. To make matters worse, Olive’s new boss and Ethan’s ex-girlfriend show up in Hawaii, forcing them both to pretend to be newlyweds so they don’t blow their cover, as their all-inclusive vacation package is nontransferable and in her sister’s name. Plus, Ethan really wants to save face in front of his ex. The story is told almost exclusively from Olive’s point of view, filtering all communication through her cynical lens until Ethan can win her over (and finally have his say in the epilogue). To get to the happily-ever-after, Ethan doesn’t have to prove to Olive that he can be a better man, only that he was never the jerk she thought he was—for instance, when she thought he was judging her for eating cheese curds, maybe he was actually thinking of asking her out. Blending witty banter with healthy adult communication, the fake newlyweds have real chemistry as they talk it out over snorkeling trips, couples massages, and a few too many tropical drinks to get to the truth—that they’re crazy about each other.
Heartfelt and funny, this enemies-to-lovers romance shows that the best things in life are all-inclusive and nontransferable as well as free.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2803-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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