by Kelly Harms ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 9, 2013
A perfect recipe of clever, quirky, poignant and fun make this a delightful debut.
When Janine Brown of Cedar Falls, Iowa, is announced as the winner of a dream home in Maine, two women who share the same name may just be what the other needs for a brand new lease on life.
Janey Brown’s Great Aunt Midge has entered her name in a Free House Sweepstakes, and when she wins the house in Maine, Janey would like nothing more than to crawl into the safe, warm haven of her kitchen and make it all go away. Speaking to strangers gives her hives and ties her tongue in knots, which she’d just as soon have happen in the comfort of her own familiar hometown. Unfortunately, Janey knows how much the house means to Aunt Midge, and Aunt Midge is smart enough to tempt Janey with the dream kitchen that comes with the home, so before long, they’re off to begin new lives on the East Coast. Meanwhile, Nean Brown also heard her name called on the contest announcement, and she, too, is headed to Maine to claim her prize. So when these three women collide on the doorstep of 1516 Shipwreck Lane, confusion and antipathy arise. Aunt Midge is 88, a true character and wise as the day is long in summer. She sees through the wisecracking Nean to the vulnerable girl inside and opens her heart and the house to her, dragging Janey grumbling behind. Along the way, Janey and Nean form a truce, then a bond, with a bit of help from Aunt Midge and a small community of people they meet and, to Janey’s shock, befriend. Janey is a professional cook and social recluse whose main interactions for the past few years have been with Aunt Midge and The Food Network. Nean is a wanderer with no education and fewer prospects. Each one must work through her own past, fear and insecurities, then turn to the other as they navigate romantic highs and lows and other life lessons in this charming winner.
A perfect recipe of clever, quirky, poignant and fun make this a delightful debut.Pub Date: July 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-01138-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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