Though a bit inconsistent, Daneshvari has great comic timing. She’s an author to watch.
Channeling Fay Weldon’s classic The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, this debut novel concerns an ugly girl’s transformation and its menacing consequences.
The opening pages of Anna Norton’s saga will have the reader gasping (not quite in sympathy) at her sad, dysfunctional life. From childhood to college, Anna has been ostracized and alone, a social misfit in search of a fairy godmother. None exist in Ohio, so she is left as is: fat, with cystic acne, black stretch pants, dandruff and dried food in the corners of her mouth. After graduating with a degree in molecular biology, she moves to New York, where she finds her FG (fairy godmother) in the form of Janice, a successful caterer who hires Anna as an assistant. FG Janice sends Anna walking all over the city in search of obscure ingredients; takes her to the Gap, so that Anna can start dressing in simple, elegant black; and ensures that all of Anna’s neighborhood takeaway establishments refuse to serve her food. Thanks to diet, exercise and a trip to the dermatologist, Anna is, if not suddenly Audrey Hepburn, at least an attractive, healthy young woman, stylishly attired. As karmic reward, she meets Ben Reynolds and is dumbstruck by his astounding male beauty. Ben, bored by shallow models, falls for Anna, and her life becomes perfect—except for all those women flirting with Ben every moment of the day. Eaten up by 22 years of insecurities, Anna embarks on The Makedown, in which Ben will become a little less desirable and remain with Anna forever. She dresses him in flannel, puts Nair in his shampoo, convinces him that a Skör bar is a new health snack, cancels his gym membership and has him grow a shaggy beard. In the process, Ben’s ego is destroyed and it is up to Ann to reverse the makedown, even if it ends their relationship.
Though a bit inconsistent, Daneshvari has great comic timing. She’s an author to watch.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-69988-4
Page Count: 326
Publisher: 5 Spot/Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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