A sometimes-difficult but uplifting read about the resilience of parents, even before their child-rearing journey begins.
A debut novel, based on the author’s experiences, about a hopeful young woman’s trials and tribulations with infertility and family planning.
Lauren and Mack Weiss, a young, upwardly mobile couple, agree to start a family but quickly discover numerous obstacles impeding their plans. At the book’s start, narrator Lauren seems to have it all: a doting husband, a high-powered political job, a fancy car. Describing themselves as “dinks”—double income no kids—Lauren and Mack are financially very comfortable. The only thing they need to complete the picture is a baby in the proverbial baby carriage. After several months of fruitless “TTC” (trying to conceive), Lauren begins an endless tour of doctors’ offices. Slowly and painstakingly, she discovers both physiological and psychological issues that may be standing in her way of conceiving. As Lauren researches and addresses potential avenues for getting a baby of her own, she’s confronted with many false starts and devastating losses. Along the way, Weinberg provides copious information about modern medical advances in fertility treatment and prenatal care in a manner that is interesting and accessible, as well as supportive of the narrative. Despite its heavy subject matter, the story is well-paced and witty, sometimes even laugh-out-loud funny. There are moments throughout the story, however, where the author overuses adjectives and superlatives—for example, when the narrator repeatedly declares such truisms as “Mack [is] the world’s most thoughtful husband.” Aside from its overly descriptive tone, the narrative is fast-paced and engaging, often reading like a casual conversation between girlfriends. As the book progresses, readers witness Lauren’s and Mack’s pain and hope, their longing and despair, and their endearing dedication to each other in the face of misfortune. Based on the true story of the author’s own difficulties starting a family, the tale will ring true for many who have endured similar struggles.
A sometimes-difficult but uplifting read about the resilience of parents, even before their child-rearing journey begins.Pub Date: June 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1626464124
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Booklocker.com, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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