by Elizabeth Noble ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2007
Slick, skillful, predictable—and bound to be a bestseller. The cover includes a “win a trip to Vegas” offer.
From British author Noble (The Reading Group, 2005), a romance that revolves around an alphabet’s worth of dates that climaxes on a trip to Las Vegas.
After 35-year-old Natalie is dumped by her snarky longtime boyfriend, her oldest friend, Tom, proverbial boy next door, takes her out for New Year’s Eve for some cheering-up. He half-jokingly proposes a game to prove to Natalie that she could fall for him: They will go on 26 dates, taking turns choosing the activity, one for each letter. Don’t expect suspense here. Tom is kind, sensitive, cute and easy-going, yet manly. He is obviously crazy about Natalie, and all of Natalie’s friends and family recognize he’s perfect for her. In fact, he has already started to win her over by B, when the difficult Birth of her sister Bridget’s new Baby allows them to escape the Ballet. (Proudly low-brow, Tom and Natalie disdain high-falutin’ culture like ballet, opera and Ian McEwan.) In H for Hotel, they drunkenly make out but pull back. In P for Paris, they spend a romantic day and almost kiss, but again are not ready. It takes the magic of V for Vegas to ignite their passion (the alphabet’s last four letters are the anticlimactic wind-down to the inevitable proposal of marriage). In counterpoint to Natalie and Tom’s blossoming romance, Natalie’s parents struggle to find equilibrium as they age and as illness enters their lives, while the marriage of Tom’s brother Patrick and his wife Lucy disintegrates after Patrick loses his job and Lucy has an affair with her best friend’s husband. Meant to be a warning, Lucy and Patrick steal the show by allowing in an occasional fresh breeze of unhappiness.
Slick, skillful, predictable—and bound to be a bestseller. The cover includes a “win a trip to Vegas” offer.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-06-112218-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
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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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