The fact that the characters happen to be African-American adds nothing to this standard woman’s empowerment romance.
Wealthy California matron in midlife crisis uses the veteran entertainer as her role model in Luckett’s debut.
While husband Randall is on an extended business trip, Lena stews in their Oakland mansion and reads Tina’s autobiography about life after Ike. Randall is no abusive Ike Turner. But he is a self-absorbed businessman who won’t go back to marriage counseling and has told Lena to figure out on her own what she wants. Lena put her ambitions as a photographer on hold in order to support Randall in his climb up the corporate ladder. Now he takes her for granted and can’t understand why she doesn’t appreciate the expensive lifestyle he’s provided. She tells him: She wants his attention, not his gifts (although readers might notice she does seem to relish the expensive trappings described in loving detail). When Randall gets home, the marriage goes from bad to worse. He may or may not be fooling around with his assistant, but he definitely resents what he considers Lena’s disloyalty as much as she resents his high-handed arrogance. When the two separate, their bratty college-age kids are with Randall all the way. Soon Lena is comfortably ensconced in her new luxury apartment with a dream gallery job starting in two weeks. She takes off for southern France, hoping to meet Tina and see her perform in concert. Wouldn’t you know it, shortly after arriving in Nice she runs into an old flame at the hotel pool. Years ago, Harmon chose another woman and has regretted it ever since. Soon he’s wining, dining and bedding Lena—not to mention proposing. When Randall shows up, full of apologies, she is understandably torn. Then she learns that her beloved mother has died and cuts her trip short. Even though Lena never actually sees Tina Turner perform, her self-affirming spirit carries the day.
The fact that the characters happen to be African-American adds nothing to this standard woman’s empowerment romance.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-54296-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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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