An erotic novel of love and religion in the Caribbean.
Christine (Caribbean Love Affair, 2014) brings readers into the passionate world of Tricia Dessington, the wife of Elias, the bishop of Calvary Isle, a tightknit community off the coast of Grenada. Tricia and Elias seem to be deeply in love, but Tricia’s intense sexual appetites are quietly tearing their happy life apart. She’s secretly begun seeking satisfaction outside of her marriage, and although these encounters are sexually fulfilling, they wreak havoc on her emotional and spiritual well-being (“Her heart felt heavy again; she felt like she was a total disappointment to God. But what was she to do? How do you suppress these types of feelings?”). When Roger Duncan, an old flame from Tricia’s past, returns to the island, she finds her loyalties torn, and soon her sexual infidelities threaten to come to light. Christianity plays a large part in this story, with questions about faith, sin, temptation and trust in God interwoven with lushly descriptive sex scenes. This makes for an original novel, but it’s uncertain who its audience is intended to be, and its ultimate message is unclear. Overall, the book seems to suffer from an identity crisis. There’s a certain amount of moralizing in awkward lines such as, “Searching for love in all the wrong places, Roger had gone about his worthless activities trying to prove that he was wanted,” and judgmental descriptions of Tricia’s passions sit by side with more steamy scenes, leaving the book stranded somewhere between erotica and Christian fiction. The story also confusingly jumps back and forth in time with lengthy expositional passages, and its sudden ending is somewhat incongruous. However, the book’s rich setting and distinct, multidimensional characters are certain to draw readers in, and those looking for a thoughtful, complex erotic thrill will find plenty to sink their teeth into.
A descriptive and dramatic, if somewhat disjointed, tale of infidelity.
Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1496935205
Page Count: 132
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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