A romantic tale about the restorative potential of travel that is both emotionally involving and predictable.
An American woman travels to Rome to find her birth mother and ends up entangled in a complicated romance.
Julia Ramos, a Texas native, takes her first trip to Europe in order to find the Italian woman who put her up for adoption when she was a baby. After landing in Rome, she sees a homeless man abusing a small dog, and before she can stop herself, she grabs the puppy and makes a run for it. She races across an open square, darts in front of an oncoming car, and the driver, British architect Daniel Stafford, narrowly avoids running her over. Even as he admonishes her for her reckless behavior, the chemistry between the pair is apparent. As luck would have it, Julia bumps into Daniel multiple times after the near accident, and he offers to help with the search for her mother by driving her and the puppy toward his sister’s house in Tuscany. Julia’s hunt for her mother grows ever more complicated, and she ends up staying with Daniel at his sister’s Tuscan home. Romance ensues, and both worry the relationship will crash, yet neither seems ready to give up. Via straightforward prose, the author presents believable characters with complex interior lives. As the storyline toggles between Daniel’s and Julia’s points of view, Mikalsen (Wrapped in the Stars, 2018) portrays two young adults who are floundering, each struggling to find meaning in the daily lives they’ve been living. As they attempt to find their places, personally and professionally, the result is a compelling tale of two people muddling their way through self-discovery. Although many secondary characters play to type, the novel abounds with well-researched details, ranging from architectural landmarks and topographical details to the cultural norms for ordering pizza. Despite the predictability of the plotline, the evocative emotional connection between the main characters makes the read worthwhile.
A romantic tale about the restorative potential of travel that is both emotionally involving and predictable.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5092-2739-6
Page Count: 342
Publisher: The Wild Rose Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
