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COPYCAT

An All About Eve–style cautionary tale for successful women.

Traci Calloway Cole has just published her third novel: Copycat. Isn’t it a coincidence that now she has a copycat of her own?

Lawson (A Sinful Calling, 2016, etc.) adds to her library of novellas documenting the soap-opera lives of the people in the Rev. Curtis Black’s congregation at Deliverance Outreach Church. Fans of the series will certainly rejoice in this latest installment, and its brevity may entice new members into Rev. Black’s fold. This episode focuses on two women writers whose friendship twists into a parasitic relationship. Unfortunately, Lawson wastes little time developing the complex psychology of either woman, favoring instead a quick accretion of troubling incidents. Traci’s admirer, Simone Phillips, currently works as an insurance claims adjuster, although she aspires to fame as a writer of romance novels. Engaged to Chris, a handsome postal worker, she has high hopes for her future, especially now that she’s escaped the clutches of her drug-addicted mother and guilt-tripping grandmother. So it’s a bit like winning the lottery when she meets the famous Traci Calloway Cole at the hair salon. Eager to learn as much as she can from a successful writer, Simone quickly friends Traci through every social media channel. For her part, Traci is eager to have a friend who is also a writer, and she’s happy to use her own good fortune to help Simone; after all, Rev. Black preaches the good word of generosity each Sunday. Utterly oblivious to her own pathology, Simone discovers that she and Traci have similar tastes in everything. Rather quickly, however, similar tastes evolve into copycatting: Simone begins dressing like Traci, tweeting like Traci, talking like Traci, driving the same car as Traci, and even attending the same church, much to Chris’ dismay. Not surprisingly, trouble ensues.

An All About Eve–style cautionary tale for successful women.

Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-4555-6971-7

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016

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A LITTLE LIFE

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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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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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