by Izner Hanna Garcia ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 2, 2011
In this chick-lit set in London, the lives of six people and one dog intertwine during the search for love.
Jimmy, generally exhausted by life, meets and courts good girl Sandy before falling for her fashion-designer best friend, Linda. They strike up a laidback relationship until he falls for Eileen, the waitress at a nearby cafe. Linda cheats on Jimmy with a guy named Ramirez, goes on a guilt-filled shopping spree and then flirts with her beau’s half-brother, Jacques. In the end, she finds real affection for Jimmy’s friend, Ian, a local judge. But don’t count out Sandy, who, in the end, finds love with sad-sack, momma’s boy Peter. Jimmy’s dog, Fatty, oversees the madness and gives solid advice. Just as in Love Actually (also set in London), we’re welcomed, through several twists and turns, into these characters lives and minds and wade with them through their dating mistakes as they search for “the one.” At first, no one seems connected, until the reader slowly pieces the story together and makes connections between the struggling singles. What the book ultimately lacks is that sometimes tiresome but often winning chick-lit formula of guy-gets-girl, guy-loses-girl, guy-wins-girl-back. With spark, wit and well-written characters, even the most “been there, done that” storyline can succeed within that set-up. Here, the characters are saddled with little back story, silly dialogue and lazy life ambitions. The writing is missing the flow and ease of phrase that keeps storytelling from getting cliché and cringe-worthy. In a solid love story, the author’s work with words becomes invisible as readers become entranced with the romance unfolding on the page. With a love story that grows tiresome too quickly (starting with two best friends fighting over a man doesn’t help), readers never invest in—and therefore have trouble caring what happens to—the people they’re reading about. Even those with the most unquenchable desire for a breezy meet-cute will have trouble swallowing this clumsy charade.
Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-434987075
Page Count: 177
Publisher: RoseDog
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960
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
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