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
Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of...
Hoover’s (November 9, 2015, etc.) latest tackles the difficult subject of domestic violence with romantic tenderness and emotional heft.
At first glance, the couple is edgy but cute: Lily Bloom runs a flower shop for people who hate flowers; Ryle Kincaid is a surgeon who says he never wants to get married or have kids. They meet on a rooftop in Boston on the night Ryle loses a patient and Lily attends her abusive father’s funeral. The provocative opening takes a dark turn when Lily receives a warning about Ryle’s intentions from his sister, who becomes Lily’s employee and close friend. Lily swears she’ll never end up in another abusive home, but when Ryle starts to show all the same warning signs that her mother ignored, Lily learns just how hard it is to say goodbye. When Ryle is not in the throes of a jealous rage, his redeeming qualities return, and Lily can justify his behavior: “I think we needed what happened on the stairwell to happen so that I would know his past and we’d be able to work on it together,” she tells herself. Lily marries Ryle hoping the good will outweigh the bad, and the mother-daughter dynamics evolve beautifully as Lily reflects on her childhood with fresh eyes. Diary entries fancifully addressed to TV host Ellen DeGeneres serve as flashbacks to Lily’s teenage years, when she met her first love, Atlas Corrigan, a homeless boy she found squatting in a neighbor’s house. When Atlas turns up in Boston, now a successful chef, he begs Lily to leave Ryle. Despite the better option right in front of her, an unexpected complication forces Lily to cut ties with Atlas, confront Ryle, and try to end the cycle of abuse before it’s too late. The relationships are portrayed with compassion and honesty, and the author’s note at the end that explains Hoover’s personal connection to the subject matter is a must-read.
Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of the survivors.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1036-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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