Sweet but never saccharine; a literary rom-com about the importance of knowing yourself.
In Davies’ exceedingly charming adult fiction debut, a romantically frustrated 20-something Londoner realizes maybe the problem isn’t her—maybe the problem is men.
It’s been three years since Julia has had sex herself, although she is frequently privy to sex—adjacent to sex, subjected to sex—living with her best friend, Alice, and Alice’s boyfriend in a flat with unfortunately thin walls. But her own sex life has been, to date, lackluster. “I’d always preferred the idea of sex to sex itself,” she muses. “The thing is, sex had never been particularly high on my list of priorities.” Dance had been her priority, but then she was injured, and so, instead of the ballet career she’d dreamed of, she has an uninspiring government job, a very opinionated therapist, and a total lack of romantic intrigue. Until, at a cool warehouse party, she meets Jane. Sex is different with Jane; everything is different with Jane. Julia is overcome with ecstatic relief: She’s a lesbian. “I felt like I belonged, at last, in the world of the sexually fulfilled,” she declares. “Now I had a sense of purpose. I was going to find someone to be a lesbian with.” And quickly, she does—not one of the women from her new queer swing-dance group (she immediately joins a queer swing-dance group), but Sam, an artist she meets at a club. But as their relationship intensifies, Sam’s one-sided demands start to feel increasingly stifling—leaving Julia to define the kind of relationship she wants for herself. Davies recounts the progression of Julia and Sam’s relationship in such detail, and with such focus, that it’s occasionally exhausting, like listening to a friend obsess over the plodding minutiae of a fundamentally doomed relationship for years. (And who among us has not?) But Davies’ writing is so breezy and effortless—and her characters so delightful—that to spend time in her world is a pleasure.
Sweet but never saccharine; a literary rom-com about the importance of knowing yourself.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-328-62967-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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
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