A predictable romance that fails to break any new ground in the genre.
Fate is written in the stars when girl meets rock singer in this novel.
Vi Golden is determined to be an incredible woman of honor for her best friend Sorcha Rosenbloom’s wedding. What she didn’t plan on is falling for sexy rock star Liam Macklin, the brother of her friend’s fiance. Liam is typecast perfection: a handsome singer who has maintained his humility and family ties. And fate has a hand in the game, as Liam dreamed about Vi and wrote a song about her long before they met. The two lovebirds hit it off during the wedding festivities and vow to reunite soon. They manage to slip in a night of romance before Liam has to fly off to continue his tour and Vi must return to San Francisco to re-enter her life as a Realtor and artist. Unfortunately, Liam’s lifestyle necessitates a background check on his lady love and Vi, feeling betrayed, bolts for home. Bigel (The Daimon Soldier Trilogy, 2019, etc.) devotes the remainder of the novel to the two attempting a reconciliation following the fight. Both Vi and Liam are likable characters. She is funny, beautiful, and artistically gifted and he is thoughtful, gorgeous, and vocally talented. Although the author tosses in a night of lovemaking, there are unfortunately not enough steamy scenes to make up for the lack of narrative tension. What there is here is a plethora of dialogue that dissects a romance only a few days old. Liam chats with his bodyguard; Vi talks to her second mother. There’s even a lot of awkward conversation during foreplay. At the sight of Liam’s chiseled body, Vi asks: “Do you work out a lot? I run and do yoga but I don’t go to a gym.” Liam, apparently, works out “to manage stress and keep my endurance up for performing.” And on and on. A little less talk and a lot more action would go a long way.
A predictable romance that fails to break any new ground in the genre.Pub Date: April 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73235-724-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: InWorld Studios
Review Posted Online: July 5, 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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