A dull and disjointed second effort from the self-described “Lit Chick.”
New York attorney concocts a strange theory to explain her dating slump.
Harmel (How to Sleep with a Movie Star, 2006) dredges up stock characters and well-tested plotlines in her second novel. Once again, an unmarried, successful, 30-year-old New Yorker struggles to find a man worthy of her time. Harper Roberts is an Ohio native who lands in New York to pursue her dream of becoming a patent lawyer. Apparently, Harper’s intellect is so razor-sharp that she leapfrogs her peers and becomes partner years ahead of schedule. Making partner at her firm kicks off the beginning of Harper’s dating dry spell; her live-in boyfriend moves out when he finds out Harper is out-earning him. Years pass, and somehow Harper manages to continually alienate the men she dates. In the midst of this romantic drought, she turns to her childhood friends Meg, Emmie and Jill (all fellow Ohio transplants) for help. Over cocktails, the girls decide to test out Harper’s theory: Men are threatened by successful women. Harper makes a pact to act and dress like a ditzy blonde cheerleader for a two-week period to see if her luck with men improves. According to the blonde theory, Harper should find more men to date if she downplays her achievements. While she does succeed in filling her calendar, all of the guys the “dumb” Harper attracts are egomaniacs looking for casual sex. In short, the theory is a flop; Harper continues to be alone and relatively miserable, and Harmel’s point in all this nonsense is lost. At least the female friendships come across as believable, as jealousy lurks beneath the surface when the marrieds and non-marrieds compare lives.
A dull and disjointed second effort from the self-described “Lit Chick.”Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2007
ISBN: 0-446-69759-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: 5 Spot/Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
If you read only one book about Korean heroic outlaws this season, this should be the one.
The famed saga of Korea’s bandit prince comes in for a new translation, if one that’s not quite idiomatic.
“Kick me with full force, so that I may know your strength.” Not exactly the sort of thing that one would cry out in the midst of some emotional moment, not exactly the most memorable of challenges. Yet, the statement and its rejoinder—“But after you kicked me I could feel my organs vibrate and my body shiver, so I know that you are a man of tremendous power”—alert us that we are in the Land of Translation, a place lots of readers associate with mustiness, fustiness, and all-around yawns. The most exciting of Hong Gildong’s adventures come to us in a chrome of not-quite-English. In fairness, he has many of them.The anonymous early modern epic celebrates the deeds of a lowborn lad, the son of a concubine, whose abilities—“He needed to hear only one thing to understand ten, and learning ten things allowed him to master a hundred”—did not go unremarked in court but naturally excited intrigue and jealousy. What’s a good prince to do? Go off and battle for truth, justice, and the Korean way, of course, taking up cause with the merry bandits of the Taebaek Mountains, robbing from the rich to give to the poor, and doing suchlike things that would meet with the approval of a checklist-wielding Joseph Campbell: liminality, check. Near-death experience, check. Students of comparative mythology will be interested to see how bits of other literatures (especially Arthurian) turn up in Hong Gildong’s story. The introduction might have made more of this lineage and discussed in more detail how modern Korean writers make use of the story in their work, but it does a competent job overall of placing the book in the context of Korean literature.
If you read only one book about Korean heroic outlaws this season, this should be the one.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-14-310769-9
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
Paralyzingly prolific romancer Michaels has her ups and downs, from the total nonsense of Finders Keepers (1998) to the exemplary plotting of Celebration (p. 103), in which a wealthy woman’s husband flees with her bank account after a 20-year marriage, only to return years later with a sob story but minus the eight million he ran off with. This latest finds the author working in her wildly unlikely mode, with a big mix of mind-bending plot turns. Callie Parker has been raised on a South Carolina plantation by her wealthy father, Clemson. During her childhood and adolescence, Dad and Mama Pearl helped Callie gather three close friends to bond with: the illegitimate orphan Bode Jessup, a kind of brother and idol for Callie; Brie Canfield, whose heart leaps when Clemson takes her in as Callie’s playmate; and Sela Bronson, a poor girl famished for love and grateful for every attention from the Parker family. Comes the day of Callie’s wedding to supremely wealthy Wyn Archer, promising a future afloat on every possible luxury. But the night before the ceremony, an auto accident caused by Wyn’s careless driving puts Callie into a coma—and from the vortex of the coma will rise many “family” secrets of parentage involving the bride-to-be and her friends. Bubble upon breaking bubble as the suds pop. Strictly for the fans.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-57566-467-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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