Deliciously crass with a unique focus on men who aren’t the one.
After freeing herself from a long marriage marred by her husband’s infidelity, a military wife rejoins the dating world only to run across more players and cheaters in Franklin’s debut novel.
Smart-mouthed Tiffany Lynn Scott spent 26 years as the woman behind the man, constantly sacrificing her own desires for her husband’s military career—only to have him cheat on her multiple times. After leaving him, she rejoins the ranks of the single in her 40s, and her days and nights are filled with meeting, greeting, and Internet dating. She’s constantly searching for Mr. Right, but too often settles for her eponymous “Mr. Right for the Moment.” Among the men is Smith, aka “Lizaaad,” nicknamed for his ample endowment; he’s a military man who skirts the line between friend and lover with her until, one day, a massage turns into a flurry of sexual passion. Smith has a fiancee and a wedding day looming, yet Tiff finds herself smitten, even as his jealous nature and the impossibility of a future with him becomes ever more apparent. When he’s shipped off to Iraq, she’s heartbroken, but then a buff, streetwise Southerner she calls “Big Country” comes into her life. He approaches her in a sincere manner that she’s not accustomed to from men, even though he’s up front about seeing other women. Her greatest ally is her Reality—her name for the sassy avatar of her inner voice, who appears in different outfits to warn her of suitors’ duplicitous actions. Franklin’s novel is a light, humorous read narrated from Tiff's point of view, which takes full advantage of the heroine’s fast-talking style and use of modern slang and military jargon. Tiff’s affinity for the vulgar accentuates the book’s humor, while its more erotic scenes are even steamier for their straightforwardness. Tiff is a refreshing lead, and proof that a middle-aged woman can be vivacious, powerful, yet still fallible. This same nuance isn’t granted to her love interests, however, who are each portrayed as little more than sex-obsessed men who weaponize their charms; indeed, Big Country and Lizaaad have little character beyond their appearance and penis size. There’s also little plot, so those expecting a fairy tale about finding Prince Charming may be disappointed.
Deliciously crass with a unique focus on men who aren’t the one.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4363-5715-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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