by Jenny Colgan ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2005
Hardly Jane Austen, but fun nonetheless.
13 Going On 30 in reverse—every bit as fluffy, and every bit as entertaining.
Just when you thought chick-lit was washed up (or had graduated to the Allison Pearson married-with-babies stage of life), out comes a Bridget-like tale with a new twist. Colgan (Amanda’s Wedding, 2004), in her fifth novel, introduces heroine Flora Scurrison. Flora (predictably) has it all, and she (predictably) is a little dissatisfied: raking in the money, but working so many hours she can’t possibly spend it; lovely boyfriend, but not sure she wants to marry him. At her best friend’s wedding, Flora lazily wishes she could return to adolescence and do it all over again. Shazam! The wish comes true. Flora wakes up in her girlhood bedroom, wearing her childhood nightgown, a nasty zit threatening to pop out on her forehead—and she’s returned to age sixteen. Funny thing is, she hasn’t exactly gone back in time. It’s still 2003, now exactly one month before that best friend’s wedding. (Tashy, said best friend, is still a thirtysomething, and recognizes teenaged Flora, as does Flora’s steadfast beau.) We spend a month following young Flora to school, to the mall, and to parties where she snogs hunky young Justin. She heroically tries to prevent her parents from splitting up, and she helps Tashy get through her prenuptial case of cold feet. But as Tashy’s wedding, redux, looms nearer, Flora knows she has to make a choice: attend the wedding and wish herself back to adulthood, or stay sweet sixteen, and do it all again. The ending isn’t exactly suspenseful, but it is surprisingly satisfying. Fast-paced dialogue is the sine qua non of the genre, and Colgan doesn’t disappoint. Those tired of the tawdry sex scenes that seem to comprise ever-greater percentages of chick-lit pages may also be pleased by the relative lack of lascivious detail.
Hardly Jane Austen, but fun nonetheless.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-33198-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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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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