A racy and sometimes witty romp through New York's yuppieland, a nasty urban jungle where making connections both sexual and professional is the only way to go. Deliberately imitating 18th-century comedies of manners—with connections between characters multiplying into a confused tangle of deceits, dalliances, and desires that don't get unraveled until the last page—Spiegelman tells of two couples, Dawn and Hank, and Kath and Jack. The couples' happiness is thwarted and deferred by a slew of colorful characters, including Chris, the designing woman with the heart of a cash register; Mike, a sentimental transvestite; Marco, an office temp who's ashamed of the source of his real income; and Andy, a fitness-freak who gets around a surprising amount. Dawn, an editor, has been abandoned by Hank, who was seduced by Chris, but Hank, finding Chris increasingly tiresome, wants to get back with Dawn. And he does—briefly—but Dawn is editing a book by Mike, who owns a notorious transvestite escort service, that could make her publishing career; and Hank is representing Mike in a case that could make his legal career. With more than the usual conflict of interest involved, the two—Dawn and Hank—quarrel and part. Meanwhile, Kath, Dawn's friend, has been so busy writing her thesis that she's had no time for relationships, but this changes when she meets handsome Jack, a scenery builder who loves her but can't commit. Over a year, the couples, who always remember to use condoms because safe sex seems about the only thing to believe in, drift into other relationships. But true love is vindicated when predictably serendipitous coincidences get Dawn and Hank—and Kath and Jack—back together again at last. A neat idea that almost works, but Spiegelman's prose is too clunky for a genre so dependent on flights of verbal virtuosity. More flat than fizzy.
Pub Date: May 30, 1993
ISBN: 0-7145-2952-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Marion Boyars
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1993
Categories: GENERAL ROMANCE | LITERARY FICTION | ROMANCE
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Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
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A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
An unlucky woman finally gets lucky in love on an all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii.
From getting her hand stuck in a claw machine at age 6 to losing her job, Olive Torres has never felt that luck was on her side. But her fortune changes when she scores a free vacation after her identical twin sister and new brother-in-law get food poisoning at their wedding buffet and are too sick to go on their honeymoon. The only catch is that she’ll have to share the honeymoon suite with her least favorite person—Ethan Thomas, the brother of the groom. To make matters worse, Olive’s new boss and Ethan’s ex-girlfriend show up in Hawaii, forcing them both to pretend to be newlyweds so they don’t blow their cover, as their all-inclusive vacation package is nontransferable and in her sister’s name. Plus, Ethan really wants to save face in front of his ex. The story is told almost exclusively from Olive’s point of view, filtering all communication through her cynical lens until Ethan can win her over (and finally have his say in the epilogue). To get to the happily-ever-after, Ethan doesn’t have to prove to Olive that he can be a better man, only that he was never the jerk she thought he was—for instance, when she thought he was judging her for eating cheese curds, maybe he was actually thinking of asking her out. Blending witty banter with healthy adult communication, the fake newlyweds have real chemistry as they talk it out over snorkeling trips, couples massages, and a few too many tropical drinks to get to the truth—that they’re crazy about each other.
Heartfelt and funny, this enemies-to-lovers romance shows that the best things in life are all-inclusive and nontransferable as well as free.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2803-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
Categories: GENERAL ROMANCE | ROMANCE
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