by Kimberley Tait ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 9, 2017
Tait’s debut novel is weighed down by stereotypical characters and situations.
A college friendship between two Dartmouth women is tested by post-graduation life in New York City.
M. (our narrator goes by a single initial) and her best friend, Belle Bailey, could not be more different. M. is an ultraserious finance major and varsity squash player who has little interest in or luck with the opposite sex. Belle is a character from a musical, “blond head and hundred-watt smile and apple-red accessories,” given to penning invitations on her monogrammed letterpress cards that say things like “Ice-skating on Occom Pond after class today—bundle up in College colors and I’ll bring the hot cocoa (spiked, of course—shhhhh!).” When both of Belle’s parents are killed in a plane crash, she becomes even more of a romantic figure. After graduation, M. lands a job at Bartholomew Brothers, “the most iconic of the New York investment banks”—as does Chase Breckenridge, the repugnant frat boy Belle's been dating all through college, though why she would be interested in this pig of a fellow remains anyone’s guess. While Belle rides around Manhattan on her red bicycle, taking photos for her airy-fairy lifestyle blog, La Belle Vie, M. toils away at the viciously sexist, competitive, and abusive firm, dealing with the horrific Chase and even less savory characters. The one exception is a whimsical former hot air balloonist named Jeremy, who could not be more out of place in finance but seems made for Belle. Unfortunately, none of these characters ever feels real, and the results of their poor choices are muffled—even the market crash seems to happen offstage. When M. turns down both the job at a socially conscious firm and the ideal man that drop on her doorstep, both are waiting for her when she comes to her senses. Along similar lines, it wasn’t a great decision to start the novel with M.'s wedding, undercutting possible suspense. “It didn’t add up to what I was told it would add up to,” says one character, referring to his career. “That may be the great tagline of our generation, you know,” says M. Unfortunately, it's also the tagline of this book.
Tait’s debut novel is weighed down by stereotypical characters and situations.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-09389-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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SEEN & HEARD
by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
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A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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