Repetitive as Chloe’s romantic experiences are, they still manage to entertain.
Fate leads to love in this realistic novel of a young woman’s adventures dating online.
Twenty-five-year-old Chloe Thompson, a first-grade teacher in Milwaukee, decides to look for love on the Internet. It’s 2003, and her newly engaged co-worker met her fiance online, so how bad can it be? If Chloe’s first date is a litmus test of the online dating pool, the answer is painfully bad. She plans to meet Scott at an Applebee’s, only to have him show up late, order chicken fingers like a child and reveal that the handsome photo of him on his profile was his senior portrait. When her ex-boyfriend Cliff calls her, she can’t resist letting him come over. She continues clicking on men’s profiles, answering icebreakers, calling strangers: There’s a firefighter who wants phone sex, an enthusiastic Packers fan, and a racist student-teacher who says he knew there was something “chinky” about her. Meanwhile, Chloe’s friends and family—from her brisk Taiwanese mother to her upstanding friend Shelly and wild Jess—offer a mix of skepticism and encouragement. Chloe is charmed when she meets Drew, a nerdy guy who sends her photos of himself in the mail to prove that his scanner is truly broken. He cooks her dinner; he’s good at Scrabble; then he reveals that he kind of has a girlfriend. The news confuses Chloe, who is struggling to avoid Cliff’s troubling advances. When Drew meets Chloe’s friends, the mix of alcohol and drama is unfitting, and Chloe’s friends convince her Drew isn’t as normal as he may seem. She’s able to move on, though, via a stream of other guys met online. On a date with Frank, Chloe bumps into her engaged co-worker, who has startling news about her now ex-fiance. Cliff’s behavior continues to frighten Chloe, leading to a final confrontation that makes everything clear for both of them. Just when Chloe thinks she’s had enough of personal ads and screen names, the advice of a psychic leads her to what could be her best match yet. Anyone who’s been on a first date will find something to sympathize with in the litany of Chloe’s experiences, from the funny to the hopeful. It’s the pain of letting go of Cliff, and all that she learns in watching her friends and family go through their own trials, that makes Chloe truly relatable. The book is thankfully not bogged down by pages of pining for the perfect soul mate. It can, however, be a bit dull reading scene after scene of Chloe and her young friends drinking to excess (several chapters open on a hung-over Chloe in her bed). The novel’s dedication page features a photo of the author’s husband—whom she met online, proving to readers that online dating can indeed lead to happily ever after.
Repetitive as Chloe’s romantic experiences are, they still manage to entertain.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499656572
Page Count: 294
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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