Topical family melodrama.
Married Bay Area woman tries to overcome a fraught relationship with her troubled teenage stepdaughter.
Mr. Right can come with big-time baggage, and that is certainly the case for interior designer Andi. Already in her late 30s when she meets and falls for divorced dad Ethan, Andi wants nothing more than to start a family of her own with him. A doting father to his two young daughters, Sophia and Emily, Ethan shares custody of them with his ex-wife Janice, a bitter, unreliable alcoholic. Sophia, ten year’s old when the story begins, adores her cool new stepmom, but 17-year-old goth princess Emily is a different story. A master of manipulation and histrionics, Emily sees Andi as a major threat in a battle for Ethan’s love. She manages to twist her overly permissive dad around her little finger—to Andi’s dismay—and acts out by experimenting with drugs and sex. Struggling with fertility issues, Andi is secretly thrilled, though, when Emily is revealed to be 7 months pregnant from one of her random hookups. Hoping that Emily will give the child to her and Ethan, she is then crushed when Ethan insists Emily give it up for adoption. Emily has other plans, of course, and gives birth to a healthy boy, Callum. But motherhood turns out to be more than she can handle, and she runs off to Portland. Andi is left to raise Cal as her own for three happy years, knowing in the back of her mind that Emily might someday return. Away from home, Emily gets a job on an organic farm and manages to clean up her act. She also repairs her relationship with Janice, who has stopped drinking, and reconnects with her childhood pal Michael, who has grown into quite a hunk. The two of them decide to move back to Mill Valley, with Emily insisting to an ecstatic Ethan and a skeptical Andi that she only wants to be a part of Cal’s life. But does she mean it, and has she really changed? Green (Promises to Keep, 2010, etc.) ramps up the emotional stakes by presenting both Andi and Emily’s points of view, even as her prose is a bit on the dull and repetitive side.
Topical family melodrama.Pub Date: March 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-59182-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
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
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Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of...
Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest (Magic Hour, 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State.
Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Meanwhile a love triangle blooms at KCPO: Hard-bitten, irresistibly handsome, former war correspondent Johnny is clearly smitten with Tully. Expecting rejection, Kate keeps her infatuation with Johnny secret. When Tully lands a reporting job with a Today-like show, her career shifts into hyperdrive. Johnny and Kate had started an affair once Tully moved to Manhattan, and when Kate gets pregnant with daughter Marah, they marry. Kate is content as a stay-at-home mom, but frets about being Johnny’s second choice and about her unrealized writing ambitions. Tully becomes Seattle’s answer to Oprah. She hires Johnny, which spells riches for him and Kate. But Kate’s buttons are fully depressed by pitched battles over slutwear and curfews with teenaged Marah, who idolizes her godmother Tully. In an improbable twist, Tully invites Kate and Marah to resolve their differences on her show, only to blindside Kate by accusing her, on live TV, of overprotecting Marah. The BFFs are sundered. Tully’s latest attempt to salvage Cloud fails: The incorrigible, now geriatric hippie absconds once more. Just as Kate develops a spine, she’s given some devastating news. Will the friends reconcile before it’s too late?
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of poignancy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36408-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
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