Credible? Just barely. Fun? Immensely. As a chronicler of hip urban travails, Christensen (In the Drink, 1999) is first-rate.
A spirited take on the oft-told tale of a life falling apart, then patching itself together again: witty, humane, romantic, and just gossipy enough to keep you flipping pages.
Could life get much worse for Jeremy? He’s spent the last decade or so working on an unpublishable novel and serving as the inept caretaker of his boyfriend’s Manhattan brownstone. The boyfriend, though, is Ted Masterson, Hollywood’s hottest action hero, who’s not only absent most of the year but deeply in the closet and recently married. As the story opens, Ted, his super-starlet wife Giselle, and their adopted child have swept into town. But any chance of a hot if complicated reunion is quickly squelched when paranoid Ted presents Jeremy with his walking papers. Jeremy’s like the gay member of The First Wives Club, suddenly without a husband, a job, or a home. He even gets revenge, albeit bittersweet: a gossip columnist overhears him in a restaurant analyzing the breakup, which leads to a blind item that brings about Ted’s downfall. Fortunately, Jeremy’s got his family, biological or not. There’s sis, preoccupied with her band and her loutish husband, but with a spare room that Jeremy briefly occupies. Mom, a successful poet, busy with her third husband, who’s developing Alzheimer’s. Best friend Felicia, who picks now, of all times, to enter rehab and kick that nasty heroin habit. And even Dad, who headed off to Turkey 20 years ago but remains alive as the subject of Jeremy’s novel. Then sweaty-palmed, bug-eyed Sebastian—a former high-school mate and now the publisher of Boytoy—gives Jeremy his first job, writing porno. And slowly Jeremy starts to put his life together. He finds his own place. A production company wants to produce a nearly forgotten screenplay. He lands a better job as a copyeditor. An editor is interested in his novel. He calls his father. He gets a date.
Credible? Just barely. Fun? Immensely. As a chronicler of hip urban travails, Christensen (In the Drink, 1999) is first-rate.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2001
ISBN: 0-7679-0801-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
PLB 0-688-13166-2 King Midas And The Golden Touch ($16.00; PLB $15.63; Apr.; 32 pp.; 0-688-13165-4; PLB 0-688-13166-2): The familiar tale of King Midas gets the golden touch in the hands of Craft and Craft (Cupid and Psyche, 1996). The author takes her inspiration from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s retelling, capturing the essence of the tale with the use of pithy dialogue and colorful description. Enchanting in their own right, the illustrations summon the Middle Ages as a setting, and incorporate colors so lavish that when they are lost to the uniform gold spurred by King Midas’s touch, the point of the story is further burnished. (Picture book. 7-9)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-13165-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.
Walker (In Love and Trouble, Meridian) has set herself the task of an epistolary novel—and she scores strongly with it.
The time is in the Thirties; a young, black, Southern woman named Celie is the primary correspondent (God being her usual addressee); and the life described in her letters is one of almost impossible grimness. While young, Celie is raped by a stepfather. (Even worse, she believes him to be her real father.) She's made to bear two children that are then taken away from her. She's married off without her consent to an older man, Albert, who'd rather have Celie's sister Nettie—and, by sacrificing her body to Albert without love or feeling, Celie saves her sister, making it possible for her to escape: soon Nettle goes to Africa to work as a Christian missionary. Eventually, then, halfway through the book, as Celie's sub-literate dialect letters to God continue to mount (eventually achieving the naturalness and intensity of music, equal in beauty to Eudora Welty's early dialect stories), letters from Nettie in Africa begin to arrive. But Celie doesn't see them—because Albert holds them back from her. And it's only when Celie finds an unlikely redeemer—Albert's blues-singer lover Shug Avery—that her isolation ends: Shug takes Celie under her wing, becomes Celie's lover as well as Albert's; Shug's strength and expansiveness and wisdom finally free up Nettie's letters—thus granting poor Celie a tangible life in the now (Shug's love, encouragement) as well as a family life, a past (Nettie's letters). Walker fashions this book beautifully—with each of Celie's letters slowly adding to her independence (the implicit feminism won't surprise Walker's readers), with each letter deepening the rich, almost folk-tale-ish sense of story here. And, like an inverted pyramid, the novel thus builds itself up broadeningly while balanced on the frailest imaginable single point: the indestructibility—and battered-ness—of love.
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.Pub Date: June 28, 1982
ISBN: 0151191549
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1982
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
