Peterson offers an amusing take on the mating habits of the Manhattan elite. And while the story holds few surprises, it...
Busy Manhattan mom in a shaky marriage to a self-absorbed lawyer hires a strapping young hipster to spend quality time with her neglected son, in Emmy-winning, former ABC News producer Peterson’s debut.
With a fulfilling TV producer job, three healthy kids and a fabulous Upper East Side apartment, Jamie Whitfield is grateful for the hand she has been dealt, in spite of her less-than-perfect relationship with her difficult husband Phillip. A spoiled preppy prone to ridiculous temper tantrums, Phillip is also a workaholic who spends very little time with his family. This has taken a toll on nine-year-old Dylan, who has become sad, distant and unable to deal with disappointment. Thinking that her boy would benefit from a stabilizing male force, Jamie interviews a series of college-aged potential mannies without luck. Her prayers are answered when she sees Peter Bailey working with a group of special needs youngsters in the park. He might only be substituting for a friend, but he is a natural with kids. The 29-year-old Colorado native is no dumb bunny either: He’s an Internet entrepreneur waiting on funding for a big project. Peter agrees to take Jamie’s well-paying and flexible gig at least until his money comes through. Once in her house, Peter proves to be outgoing and warm. He has a positive effect on the kids, with Dylan overcoming his issues under Peter’s big-brotherly wing. Peter also has an unexpected (to Jamie, if not the reader) effect on Mom, helping her see the hypocrisy of the hoity-toity world in which she lives, and getting her to stick up for herself at home and at work. Things with Phillip, meanwhile, continue to erode, and Jamie begins to realize she might have feelings for “the help.”
Peterson offers an amusing take on the mating habits of the Manhattan elite. And while the story holds few surprises, it benefits greatly from an attractive pair of would-be lovers.Pub Date: June 19, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-34040-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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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