Would-be seamstresses achieve self-realization through free-form couture, in the second of Cano-Murillo’s Crafty Chica series (Waking Up in the Land of Glitter, 2010).
Miss Scarlet Santana (named after a character in the game Clue, not Gone with the Wind) is the wild card in a family of high-achieving Latinos in Glendale, Ariz. Although she has two engineering degrees, she prefers to work in a fashion atelier under the hawkish gaze of her boss Carly. On the side, she sews her own product line, Mexibilly Frocks, and has developed unique methods of custom-fitting women. Scarlet’s guiding spirit, the inspiration for her blog, Daisy Forever, is Daisy de la Flora, a designer of retro kitsch clothes who got her start as a fan of Carmen Miranda’s flamboyant style. Scarlet needs to raise money because she has just won a coveted place in an NYC design school run by Daisy’s nephew, Johnny “Scissors” Tijeras. Daisy is a recluse; she entrusted her enterprises to Johnny’s dubious management when she decided, in her later years, to travel the world helping underprivileged women. Publicized by her blog, Scarlet’s class attracts a motley crew of apprentices. Among them: Mary Theresa, a buttoned-down yuppie whose home life is crashing down around her because her house-husband Hadley has rebelled. She’s recently been demoted to telecommuter because her micromanagement has demoralized her office-mates. Feisty septuagenarian Rosa appears to have Scarlet’s class on her bucket list. Rosa also knows far more than she lets on about Scarlet’s idol Daisy, which sets up a surprising plot twist. With wit and sass reminiscent of Fannie Flagg, Cano-Murillo manages to extract much mirth from her cast of craftsters, each striving to transcend restrictive patterns in life (as well as dressmaking) and to defeat family expectations that are squelching self-expression. Too often, though, the humor is deadened by preachy affirmations and new-age bromides. Veers dangerously into Mary Engelbreit territory.
Pub Date: March 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-446-50923-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011
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
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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