An ideal, frothy beach book.
Debut author Lea presents a quaint snapshot of small-town life and explores the bonds of friendship and love in her novel.
Sara’s life has fallen apart. Following her divorce and recent job loss, she is out of options and low on cash. In a last-ditch effort to pull her life together, Sara packs up her teenage daughter, Ginny, and moves back to her childhood home—the charming seaside town of Destinybay. But things have changed in Sara’s absence; the once-bustling downtown is now home to several vacant storefronts and a plethora of available parking spaces. Her best friends, Alex and Diana, have family problems of their own. The only constant is Sara’s mother, whose distant, disapproving attitude hasn’t changed since Sara fled home years ago. Given the title of the book, it’s no surprise when destiny knocks and things begin looking up. Sara reconnects with friends and establishes a tentative truce with her mother. Robert, a kindly family friend and businessman, takes on the role of fairy godmother when he offers to finance the reopening of a defunct coffee shop. The cafe brings challenges, new friends and professional fulfillment for Sara, as it becomes the locus of a downtown revitalization. Yet Sara finds herself distracted by her former childhood sweetheart, Sam, who makes it clear he’s never gotten over her. Lea presents a lively cast, tossing in enough pop-culture references to make Lorelai Gilmore proud. Sam and Sara’s relationship is central here, but the lasting friendship of Lea’s female protagonists is also a significant, intriguing facet of her novel. The author ably follows several storylines, including the inner workings of Alex’s and Diana’s lives. Lea paints a homey, if clichéd, picture of small-town life. Her descriptions of harvest festivals, town parades, summer camps and eccentric personalities drop the reader right in the middle of the archetypal town square.
An ideal, frothy beach book.Pub Date: April 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1480805149
Page Count: 394
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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