by Jane Green ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 14, 2000
Slightly unpredictable story development saves this from exactly duplicating the vast mound of similar feel-good modern...
An overweight woman turns from ugly duckling to swan in British novelist Green’s American debut: a tale that offers plenty of engaging plot twists but not much substance.
Jemima spends many secret hours pouring over fashion magazines, whose cheeky, “how to improve your [fill in the blank]” tone the novel echoes. It’s a depressing activity, since Jemima—a good hundred pounds over the limit for contemporary beauty—looks nothing like the supermodels who cavort through those glossy pages. Her job writing the household hints column for a London newspaper bums her out too, as does the fact that gorgeous Ben, the man of her dreams, adores her as a friend but nothing more. When Jemima gets on the Internet for the first time, she realizes that in cyberspace a little extra fat doesn't matter if it isn't mentioned. So she begins an online flirtation with Brad from L.A., who sends a picture and turns out to be a real hunk. Thanks to a computer-enhanced photo of herself (thinner all over), Brad wants Jemima to fly to California for a rendezvous. So she loses weight, dyes her hair blond, and dons the wardrobe of a sophisticated ‘somebody.’ Now known as J.J., Jemima gets to California and is so shocked that a man like Brad would be interested in her that she wills herself to fall in love. But something is wrong: sweet Ben never leaves her mind. Sure, Brad is good-looking, but what else? Has Jemima met Mr. Perfect? Or should she hold out for Ben—that is, if she ever sees him again? (Readers should not spend a lot of time worrying about this last question.)
Slightly unpredictable story development saves this from exactly duplicating the vast mound of similar feel-good modern fairy tales for women, but it lives in the same neighborhood.Pub Date: June 14, 2000
ISBN: 0-7679-0517-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
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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 J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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