A smart, well-observed saga of lifestyle redemption that’s weighed down by an inert heroine.
A desperate housewife seeks to renew her spirit and her relationship with her family through a radical new diet in this tasty novel of recovery.
Thirty-something Chicago mom Colleen Adler drinks too much and struggles with a thyroid condition and constipation. She cedes the mothering of her two young daughters to the maid; frets that her husband, a lawyer, is having an affair; and suffers catty abuse from her mother-in-law, Dinah, the queen bee of the Harborview Country Club. Worst of all, in her view, she’s gained weight—she’s now 185 pounds—and she fears a social firing squad if she can’t fit into a svelte designer dress in time for Harborview’s Fourth of July gala. She repairs to weight-loss guru and all-around healer Kory Stone, whose ministrations include mirror work and talk therapy. Her central treatment, however, is a “detox diet” of sadistically healthy fare, prepared by a holistic chef—complete with kale, quinoa, yams, and seaweed. Colleen endures an agonizing week of caffeine-withdrawal headaches and doughnut cravings—but then she starts feeling lighter, regains her regularity, and perks up enough to read bedtime stories; soon, the bathroom scale noses downward. Then it’s time for deeper work, as Kory’s psychic friend Rachel helps Colleen communicate with her dead brother’s shade and reconnect with her parents, which requires her to confront their toxic home-cooked meals. Debut author Booker, a wellness coach, pokes entertaining fun at an appearance-obsessed culture of well-heeled women and vividly captures their sensuous battle with food. (Colleen “loved the soft snap of cold cheese as she bit down into the sweet tomato sauce” of leftover pizza.) Her countervailing depiction of New Age therapeutics sidesteps satire, though, and feels a bit too earnest. Booker’s prose is sharp and engaging, but Colleen is a weak protagonist; for much of the book, she’s a feckless person who relies on others for expectations and direction until extreme dieting finally rouses a little gumption in her. It’s a shrewd portrait of a dysfunctional personality, but sometimes Colleen is too dreary for readers to care about her.
A smart, well-observed saga of lifestyle redemption that’s weighed down by an inert heroine.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9998234-0-8
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Cricket Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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
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