If you like basking in over-the-top banter and don’t roll your eyes at perfectly neat endings, you’ll have a fun afternoon...
Think you’d do anything for the chance to be supermodel pretty? Well, it gets messy.
In Clark’s (Parched, 2014, etc.) first adult novel, self-esteem issues compel a group of friends to renounce rational decision-making for a chance to take their looks from average to unforgettable. Evie Selby, a copywriter at a women’s magazine, is having a hard time accepting the culture of online dating. Her roommate, Krista Kumar, dropped out of law school to start an acting career, but it’s going nowhere. And their good friend Willow, a troubled photographer and daughter of a famous director, doesn’t understand what her puppy-dog boyfriend, Mark, sees in her. They’re all in bad places. If only they were prettier, right? They’d have more confidence, get more opportunities. When a shot at this lands magically in their laps, all three can’t help but grasp at the possibilities that come with trying a drop of the Pretty. Warning: now’s the time to suspend your disbelief. One drop of the Pretty potion gets them a week of long-legged, doe-eyed bliss. So, they make (terrible) excuses for the whereabouts of their real selves and walk through the doors that suddenly begin to open for them. Doors that lead to movie roles and dates with the superflirtatious novelist Velma Wolff. You'll find yourself getting sucked in as things descend into chaos, but there really isn’t a solid foundation to this story. An opportunity to build up a back story for the Pretty comes and goes in one underwhelming chapter. And while these characters promote liberating views on female sexuality, issues are either dulled by self-congratulating rants or resolved in fairy tale–esque fashion. One redeeming quality is that becoming Pretty does not involve a Cinderella-like transformation—it takes the adage “beauty is pain” to a new level.
If you like basking in over-the-top banter and don’t roll your eyes at perfectly neat endings, you’ll have a fun afternoon on the beach with this one.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1959-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Emily Bestler/Atria
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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