A light and lively sendup of modern woes.
A recently divorced, financially struggling mom faces online dating challenges when a nude picture of her surfaces on the internet.
You would think things couldn't get worse for Penelope Lemon. Since the timer ran out on her marriage to the biggest nerd in her neck of Virginia, she and her son—bullied and dubbed Fart Boy by his schoolmates—have had to move into her parents' basement. Her job as the top waitress at Coonskins, a so-called roadhouse where bus tours unload patrons to compete for tables with "a once-in-a-lifetime view of the parking lot and the traffic on Lee Highway," could easily be mistaken for one of the circles of hell. For a 40th birthday gift, her mother has bought her a Christian dating app called Divote, where she's begun to receive messages from hunky prospects like BrettCorinthians2:2, but her best friends, Sandy and Rachel, are convinced she'd be better off doing macrame or reading The Kite Runner than wading back into the dating pool. Then something happens to prove their point. While navigating through the porn-site pop-ups that make it so annoying to use her father's ancient computer, she's sucked in by an ad for PaybacksAreHeaven.com. There she finds herself particularly engaged by a photo of a sleepy redhead on a waterbed. Then the memories come flooding back. "Yes, now that she thought of it, she had definitely posed nude while hitting a bong. The bong was green. Her name was Tinkerbell. Recalling all this, Penelope spent a moment wondering if she was really meant for life in the middle class." Majors (Loves Winning Plays, 2012, etc.) writes lines like that for breakfast, so you'll want to stay for lunch.
A light and lively sendup of modern woes.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8071-6951-3
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Louisiana State Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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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