Erotic tale about the pleasures and pitfalls of swinging and swapping, with enticing dialogue and a disappointing finale.
A bickering African-American couple is amusingly unfaithful in author Whitehall’s frisky debut novel.
Accountant Maia and attorney Michael Henderson live with their two children, Andrea, 13, and Tre, 9, in Bowie, Maryland. At lunch, Maia’s friend Diane informs her that Michael is cheating. At 5 feet 5 inches tall and 235 pounds, Maia has become undesirable to her relatively fit husband, who’s always looking for a “side piece.” Maia’s married boss, Andrew “Drew” Neal, has an eye for her and, sensing she’s unhappy, makes his move only to be rejected. Michael’s infidelity is multilayered. In addition to making it with a potential employee, he’s flirting online at Blackconnections.net, has the occasional fling with one of Maia’s girlfriends and, with a co-worker, visits a club called Xxtasy. Here’s a steamy story of yet another husband and wife—told from their alternating perspectives—who are affluent (she carries a Coach bag and wears Gucci pumps) and restless in their marriage. It’s a familiar story with a fresh take, peppered with zippy, humorous dialogue primarily about sex, as when frustrated Maia informs her husband that she’s “dick deprived.” Proud, possessive Michael is saddled by a Madonna/whore complex: He thinks a wife should behave, so he looks for rough and wild elsewhere. Dutiful Maia is the compliant wife; weary of the missionary position, she finds solace in Twinkies, turning to vibrator Bunny as her man loses interest. The title moniker applies to both husband and wife. Maia, on advice from a friend, sets a “honey trap,” adopting an online persona to expose Michael’s infidelity, and she eventually indulges in a cheater’s game. The escalating situation between husband and wife, which puts their marriage at risk, captivates more than Michael or Maia, who become increasingly tiresome in their complaints. A standout character is bold, brash swinger Nina Laussat, new to town and looking for work. She plays with Michael and Maia, both together and separately, voicing dismay at Michael’s lack of stamina and Maia’s take-without-giving approach. One significant downer: After pages of buildup, the book ends abruptly with the click of a phone. It’s a less than satisfying climax, but there’s always Bunny.
Erotic tale about the pleasures and pitfalls of swinging and swapping, with enticing dialogue and a disappointing finale.Pub Date: March 31, 2014
ISBN: 978-1493189250
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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