A fairly boilerplate but action-oriented erotic novella.
Sykes’ (Stolen Innocence, 2019, etc.) erotic BDSM thriller tells the story of a Colombian woman kidnapped by her childhood sweetheart.
Twenty-six-year-old Valentina Sánchez never expected to see former love Adrián Rodríguez again. However, he’s returned to Bogotá to attend the wedding of his father, Vicente, the head of a Colombian drug cartel. Valentina is married to the abusive Hugo, Vicente’s second-in-command, so she has no choice but to attend—just as she had no choice in whether to marry Hugo when she was 16. She’s alarmed that Adrián is now such a “hard, frightening” man; when Hugo attempts to force himself on Valentina at the reception, Adrián beats Hugo senseless. Then Adrián hoists her over his shoulder and kidnaps her. With the help of his friend Mateo, he plans to escape with her to Panama and ultimately to California, where he thinks they’ll be beyond Vicente and Hugo’s grasp. Valentina, however, doesn’t want to be Adrián’s prisoner; she’s afraid of his attraction to power and violence. As time passes, though, she wonders whether she finds something pleasurable about being in the thrall of a man. The narration alternates between Valentina’s and Adrián’s perspectives, allowing readers to observe both her defiant fear (“I was done being a pawn. Done being an object to be traded and stolen in power exchanges between cruel men”) and his roiling, jealous desire: “Years of impotent fury had only slightly been siphoned off by breaking [Hugo’s] doughy face. But carrying his wife off…provided me with a deeper, darker pleasure.” The overall plot is formulaic for the genre, however, and offers few surprises. However, fans of Fifty Shades of Grey and its sequels will likely enjoy this offering, which adds an action element—car chases, gunfights, and an instance in which Valentina is abducted and Adrián must save her. These scenes are generally well-paced, as is the rest of the novel, although some moments can be quite violent: “I let my own gun slip from my fingers, grasping the handle of my machete with both hands. I swung it down with a roar, decapitating one of the men.”
A fairly boilerplate but action-oriented erotic novella.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-79411-657-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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