An intriguing rags-to-riches story that lacks nuanced characters.
A debut romantic comedy focuses on a small-town girl who gets discovered, takes chances, and tries to celebrate never fitting the mold.
Alex Emmerson is a college student living at home and working at Safeway when a chance encounter changes her life. Glamorous scout Robin Ramon sees potential in the tall 20-year-old and soon Alex is flying from Canada to New York to start an unexpected modeling career. Of course, nothing is that easy. Alex soon has to contend with weight loss and body image issues as well as an older model roommate who fails to clean the apartment, triggering Alex’s plumbaphobia (fear of strange bathrooms) and leading the wannabe model to purchase loads of Saran Wrap and rubber gloves. (She also, at almost 21, carries a security blanket everywhere.) After one too many model castings go wrong, Alex undergoes a makeover courtesy of glamorous fairy godmother Virginie, but better hair and clothes don’t hide her awkward demeanor and lack of filter. Broke and dropped by her agency, Alex takes a bartending job at the tony Le Brasserie restaurant and finds a whole new peer group—and a love interest in the handsome but enigmatic Dante. As Alex’s social media profile grows after a disastrous runway show goes viral, will the friendly British Canadian keep trying to conquer the catwalk? Or will she embrace her imperfections and learn to love herself just as she is? In this ambitious tale, Tong gives readers a plucky heroine who possesses more than one major flaw, and rich, evocative details about the modeling world. But Alex’s tendency to blurt out whatever’s on her mind often yields problematic generalizations about race and sexuality. Even when she learns her lesson, it’s thanks to emotional labor from people of color or queer characters (such as the black clerk at her local Safeway and Virginie’s gay best friend) who are stereotypes in and of themselves. Finally, Alex’s plumbaphobia hints at a serious mental health issue that she blatantly refuses to see a doctor for, continuing to skip through life hurting others’ feelings.
An intriguing rags-to-riches story that lacks nuanced characters.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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