An explicit, erotic, entrancing detective story for the seriously committed lover of erotica.
The erotic education of former escort Elle Lorand continues, plunging her into a world of sensual delights. But she soon finds herself on a quest not only to solve the mystery of her ex-fiance’s birth, but also to save her partner from jail.
Having broken her engagement to David Barlet and fallen in love with his older brother, Louie, her sexual tutor, Elle impetuously asks for Louie’s hand in marriage. Startled yet pleased, Louie consents, on the condition that Elle complete her amorous education through a series of tests. Elle agrees, and the games begin. Mars (Hotelles, 2014) excels at orchestrating elaborate, emotionally charged sex scenes, making the physically implausible ring psychologically true in this, the second novel in a steamy trilogy translated from the French. More Anaïs Nin than E.L. James, Mars weaves a psychologically complex tale; she creates a world in which sex sanctifies. Elle and Louie do truly communicate through their bodies, planning sexual adventures for each other that test trust and vulnerability. Yet an art exhibit at Louie’s gallery sends the entire enterprise spiraling down. Tipped off that the gallery would project pornographic images into the night sky, the police descend, arresting Louie. While Louie awaits his trial, Elle faces a number of quandaries: Can she physically survive without Louie’s addictive, sensual touch? Has she lost her identity in his bed? Who has stolen their shared journal, detailing each erotic encounter? Is Louie truly behind the blog spilling all of their secrets? Bereft and bewildered, Elle cannot resist David’s offers to help, despite her suspicions that he may be less interested in exonerating his brother than in covering up more secrets of his own. Perhaps the answers lie hidden in the Hotel des Charmes.
An explicit, erotic, entrancing detective story for the seriously committed lover of erotica.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-227419-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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
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