A well-written, character-driven story swamped by exposition.
Cha’s debut is a romantic dramedy of errors focused on two adults as they navigate the complicated waters of modern life and love—and their own overlapping destinies.
After overcoming a complicated past, Helena Park can finally be proud of her professional accomplishments. A senior supervising consultant at Advent Solutions in Los Angeles, Helena is enjoying the perks of upper management and is a valued decision-maker. When a search for a junior consultant brings her to Chicago, Helena has no idea that her life is about to change. She feels an instant attraction to a younger applicant named Tom Overton and feels certain that he is “the one.” Tom, too, has a fraught past and secretly entertains dreams of working as a writer. Helena uses her company influence to get him hired only to realize that they won’t be interacting often; he’ll be based in Chicago. Desperate to bring him into her life permanently, she and a friend concoct a scheme to get him an LA–based writing job. Helena’s maneuvering leaves her unprepared for ensuing complications. Cha’s writing is skilled and detailed, but she struggles to balance back story, action, and exposition as she slowly reveals Helena and Tom’s respective histories, particularly Helena’s past mental health issues and drug abuse. At times, the book reads more like a lengthy character study than a well-plotted novel, and the exposition threatens to topple the plot. Also, readers may struggle with understanding Helena’s actions. Is Helena a disturbed, even threatening, stalker? Or is her scheming—which can be mean-spirited—simply a necessary part of reaching her destiny, revealed in an unexpected twist in the book’s final pages?
A well-written, character-driven story swamped by exposition.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2014
ISBN: 978-0692252581
Page Count: 276
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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