A rollicking beach read, but it won’t endure close scrutiny.
After fairy-tale weddings, three estranged girlfriends reunite to pick up the pieces of their broken happily-ever-afters.
Seven years after Jane announced to her dumbstruck best friends, Meg and Cara, that she had spontaneously married Doug Logan, a successful wealth manager, her life is in shambles. It turns out that Doug has been bamboozling his clients, and now the feds are after him. Led off in handcuffs, he leaves Jane to face frozen bank accounts, angry neighbors, and the paparazzi. Even though Meg and Cara had pretty much written reckless Jane out of their own happily and conventionally married lives, Jane decides to reconnect. Yet Meg’s and Cara’s lives have careened as well. Beneath the facade of her perfect marriage, Cara suffers in silence as Reed humiliates her daily, breaking down her self-esteem. After multiple miscarriages, Meg has left her husband, Steve, telling him it’s for his own good that they separate. She’s taken refuge at their Montauk cottage, baking away her miseries in solitude, until Jane convinces Cara to run away and they end up at Meg’s door, ready to heal their friendship and repair their fragmented love lives. Duffy’s (On the Rocks, 2014) somewhat clichéd tale is saved by genuinely funny dialogue—especially Jane’s. Distinctively, sometimes viciously wry, Jane’s words deftly transform her criminal husband from a Prince-Charming-gone-south into a common, stock felon out of central casting. Like all the husbands, Doug is practically erased from Jane’s life—and Duffy’s novel—the moment he collapses in tears at Jane’s feet; Steve simply waits, inexplicably patiently, for Meg to return; Reed plays the emotionally abusive villain. Meg’s friend Nick also suffers, reduced to the stereotypical gay friend. Luckily, he is also roped into felonious shenanigans designed to set the women on track for more independent denouements.
A rollicking beach read, but it won’t endure close scrutiny.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-240589-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© 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.
