An entertaining novel about the perils of finding love in Greece.
Papanikolaou, in an homage to the TV series Sex and the City, tells the story of a lovable 30-something woman with a disastrous love life in the party-loving city of Athens, Greece.
In this novel translated from the Greek, a few years have passed since 34-year-old Andriana moved back to Athens, leaving London and her boyfriend Alexis behind to establish her law career. Now Andriana is dealing with the ups and downs of her relationship with a man she calls “Mr. Tall.” Her close friends are there to discuss every nuance of the roller-coaster relationship, including the painfully rude Gina, who’s in an on-again, off-again relationship herself; the somewhat daft Lilly, who encourages Andriana to think positively; and Harry, Andriana’s best straight-male friend, who’s also trying to find love. Andriana is never quite secure in her relationship with Mr. Tall, and when he’s drafted into the army, she becomes even more doubtful of his fidelity. When she finally decides to break up with him, she wallows in self-pity—until Alexis suddenly shows up. Papanikolaou brings her protagonist to life, insecurities and all, and ably describes Andriana’s party lifestyle, which is punctuated occasionally by work and business trips. Andriana, despite her relationship mishaps, also offers some pearls of wisdom: “[H]appiness, instead of being a conscious decision and choice, ends up being purely a matter of luck.” Although there are some gaps in the book’s plot, and Andriana’s unrelenting self-doubt can be tedious at times, the book provides a fine cast of characters. The author makes no secret that she’s emulating Sex and the City, however; even her cigarette-smoking, Bellini-drinking heroine equates Mr. Tall with that series’ Mr. Big.
An entertaining novel about the perils of finding love in Greece.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-9609355957
Page Count: 310
Publisher: AKH Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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