An engaging tale about the importance of allowing friendships to evolve.
After her best friend gets married, a 28-year-old woman must reevaluate her own life in this novel.
Romy Belkin and Pia Zimble have been best friends since the ninth grade. After attending the same college, they found an apartment to share in Brooklyn, where they’ve been cohabiting happily ever since. They enjoy their nightly routines together so much that neither one minds her dead-end job, working as what Romy calls “urban menials.” After Romy, who loves to cook, makes shirred eggs, Pia suggests that she do it again for a video. But Romy decides to teach her friend the custom recipe and record her efforts. They eventually post the video starring Pia on YouTube. Before long, they are regularly posting instructional videos where Pia pretends she is the chef and sole mastermind behind the recipes. To their great surprise, Pia begins to develop a following. Romy is happy to remain in the shadows and allow Pia the spotlight, even after they are approached for a cookbook deal. They are earning enough to quit their day jobs, and they’re having a blast. Unfortunately, their fledgling business hits a stumbling block when Pia meets Nicolo Gia and gets engaged in what feels like a hot second. The couple is married before Romy can blink, and she’s suddenly struggling to fill the gaping hole left by Pia’s absence. Romy develops a couple of unlikely friendships and embarks on a string of one-night stands, threatening to self-destruct in grief over the recent distance from her best pal. Full of wonderful sensory details about food and methods of cooking, the narrative voice sizzles with passion and reverence for flavor and spice. Told in the first person by Romy, Deborah’s (Rosalind, 2019, etc.) novel reads at many points like nonfiction, creating the impression that at least a portion of the tale is autobiographical. As the plotline moves further away from food, additional themes begin to take center stage, like self-confidence, romance, and self-determination. The author also sheds light on some of the difficulties inherent in finally growing up, including loneliness and self-doubt. Told in a plot-focused, accessible prose, the story deals artfully with many issues that pop up along the road to personal growth, including heartbreak, jealousy, and disappointment.
An engaging tale about the importance of allowing friendships to evolve.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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