A bit shallow but always enjoyable.
Three girlfriends across the pond navigate the roller coaster of sex, love and life in this entertaining chick-lit debut.
If Sex and the City had taken place in London with a trio of spirited black women, it might look something like the adventures of Coco, Chama and Tasha. Three friends from university, they meet for weekly gossip sessions at their favorite bistro, but lately there has been trouble in girlfriend paradise. Chama, now a deeply religious, doting wife, harshly judges her friends. Tasha has devoted herself to a spiritual path of meditation, yoga and her spirit guide, Pam, becoming a whimsical hippie in the process, much to Chama’s and Coco’s chagrin. And Coco, the Louboutin-wearing, Beamer-driving editor of Chocolate magazine, may have ruined her marriage when she was caught hooking up with an old flame. While Coco gets cut off from her wealth, Chama struggles to get her husband sexually interested in her again, and Tasha realizes that her boyfriend, Kerin, is cheating on her. Instead of leaning on each other for help, the women dig themselves into a deeper mess. In order to survive each of the problems they’ve found, Coco, Chama and Tasha discover that they have to drop the attitudes, speak the truth, and show up for one another. It may take a lot of confessions, a few tropical drinks and one late-night heist, but nothing will stop these women from ending up on top. Told in alternating chapters from three points of view with more interior monologue than storytelling, the novel bounces along, delighting in the conversational tone of each woman’s personality. Their voices have built-in asides, breaking the text every few paragraphs, whether it’s Tasha’s meditation chants, Chama’s religious Scriptures or Coco’s sarcastic rebuttals. The asides can be a bit distracting from the plot that’s trying to unfold, yet every chapter works hard to end on a note of suspense. Since the women are drawn as such extreme characters, there’s an air of disbelief that they’d all be such good friends, but the novel rolls forward with a good sense of humor, lots of sex talk and a fair amount of fashion. While it’s not the most original plot, it’s refreshing to see women of color at the forefront of a fun chick-lit novel.
A bit shallow but always enjoyable.Pub Date: March 31, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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