A business-driven debut thriller, laced with romantic entanglements.
Gates’ (Walking to Israel, 2014) novel, set in 2003, is split into two interlocking parts: One is set in Milwaukee, the other in France. Tyler is a handsome, brash international executive for a major American telecom company, GlobeAll, looking to close a substantial deal in France. But Delphine, the chief negotiator for the French company, FranceFon, resists signing on the dotted line. Their tug of war becomes more complicated when their attraction threatens to blossom into something more than professional friendliness. She eventually discloses the source of her discomfort with the deal—she strongly suspects Tyler’s company of deeply unethical and illegal practices. Later, back in Milwaukee, Carly, a GlobeAll regional executive, hears swirling rumors about her company, and she soon makes Tyler’s acquaintance. They struggle to process the revelations about the company they love and discover that they share a crackling sexual tension. The artful prose effectively captures the sensual dynamism that underscores the entire narrative: “He held the bottle up to her, smiling again, so beguiling that he hardly resembled the man she’d recently known. He seemed like the one she’d met last summer, the one who’d gazed longingly and listened patiently and loved so thoroughly that it still made her wet to recall.” The author also does a credible job of educating readers about the complexities of the telecom industry without burying them in confusing jargon or gratuitous detail. (Gates is an international telecom expert and even went to the same business school as her protagonist, Tyler.) She also nicely juxtaposes the jagged cynicism of big business with the tenderness of the love stories.
A light, entertaining tale of love and commercial intrigue.
Pub Date: April 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0988890688
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Wells Street Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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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