When California budget cuts eliminate her consumer-advocate job, Katie Johnson hits on the bright idea of starting a service...
Ask not for whom the biological clock tolls—a San Francisco baby planner indulges in some planned parenthood of her own.
When California budget cuts eliminate her consumer-advocate job, Katie Johnson hits on the bright idea of starting a service to research the best and safest childcare products for new parents. Katie moves in the opulent circles of Bay Area tech-bubble wealth: Her husband Alex owns a private-equity firm (not entirely inaptly called S&M) which milks Silicon Valley’s richest cash cows. As a concierge ushering privileged progeny into the world, Katie’s days are soon monopolized by her clients, including Joanna, a high-powered attorney whose pregnancy by her second husband is upsetting her teenage daughter by her previous marriage, Twila, a gaming executive who is pregnant by a married work associate, and Seth, whose wife’s death in childbirth has left him hard-pressed to cope with his adorable infant daughter Sadie. But Katie’s own situation partly informs her career choice. She longs to have a child, but Alex keeps stalling: He is either too busy for children, he says, or still too traumatized by his ex-wife’s removal of his son from the country. Desperate, Katie surreptitiously pierces Alex’s condoms and goes off the pill. Months later, she still hasn’t conceived, despite many gratuitous sex scenes seemingly intended to earn the cover blurb from Jackie Collins. Seth is a founder of SkorTek, a company with which Alex has just structured a deal that involves an ultimate lucrative cashing-out of the original partners. Katie finds herself increasingly attracted to Seth, who’s being edged out of SkorTek by Alex on the pretext that his single fatherhood is dragging down his work performance. Startling revelations follow, but readers may be less than convinced that Katie, who is such an able fixer for others, could be so oblivious to the red flags in her own life.Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9712-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
