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
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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