Quirky and bighearted.
A millennial’s account of how she went from being the girl all her female friends wanted at their weddings to a professional bridesmaid.
The thought of weddings never inspired Glantz, who founded Bridesmaid for Hire. As a child, she wondered about which toy she’d find in her next McDonald’s Happy Meal, while other girls contemplated “the cuts of their future [wedding] rings, the colors of their future flowers, and the flavors of their future cakes.” By the time she graduated from college, Glantz had become a veteran of “bad dates…email breakups [and] Tinder messages full of bad grammar and lame come-ons,” while her friends had settled into long-term relationships. A chance encounter with a soon-to-be-married friend drove the author to shake up her life with a move to New York. Finding work as a “bottom-level PR assistant” with a salary that “resemble[d] that of a top-level intern,” she was soon under pressure from her mother to find a husband or, at the very least, freeze her eggs. In the meantime, she found herself attending—and very often saving—her friends’ weddings. On a half-drunk whim, Glantz put an offer on Craigslist to provide “professional bridesmaid” services, which included making sure other bridesmaids didn’t “paint their nails lime green” and “holding up the 18 layers of [a wedding dress]” while brides used the bathroom. Her post went viral, and soon she was besieged with requests from brides all over the country. Yet temporary celebrity did nothing for her professional life, which at one point included three jobs. But as she continued working with brides, Glantz learned more about love than she imagined. Some married “the first person they kissed”; others, like the woman with a gay boyfriend, married people who could never fully return their love. Funny and at times touching, the book is a thoroughly modern story about love and youth, right down to the open, not necessarily happy-ever-after ending.
Quirky and bighearted.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3906-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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