An engaging, if unevenly executed, cross-cultural romance.
A Jewish woman from Manhattan takes a chance on love with a Hispanic doctor from New Mexico and confronts cultural and geographic differences in novelist Reznik’s (The Girl from Long Guyland, 2012) sequel.
It’s 1977, and 28-year-old Laila Levin has a successful career as a sociologist studying teen pregnancy. Still, her mother isn’t happy that Laila isn’t married—or even seriously dating. But although Laila’s not looking for love, she stumbles into a relationship with physician Eduardo Quintana. Almost immediately, he invites her to move with him to his hometown of Espanola, New Mexico. Laila accepts, transplanting her life and career out of the big city. However, adjusting to small-town New Mexico life is hardly the worst of her troubles, as she faces anti-Semitic hostility from Eduardo’s mother and added pressure from the fact that Eduardo’s high school sweetheart is back in town. Meanwhile, a stalker is determined to make Laila the girl of his dreams. Reznik draws on some elements of her real life in this novel, and the humorous details of Jewish and Hispanic family life ring true, offered with a smattering of Yiddish and Spanish dialogue. The author tells a simple love story, but she structures the novel to provide a panoramic view of her characters. This is her second book featuring Laila as a protagonist, who tells the story from a first-person point of view in some parts. But other sections, in the third person, follow Eduardo, Eduardo’s mother and ex-girlfriend, and even Laila’s stalker. Although the jumps between perspectives are sometimes jarring, this technique allows Reznik to add depth and motivation to secondary characters. She also stays true to her theme of overcoming cultural differences. Overall, the story is well-paced, with scenes of excitement and danger. However, it’s also full of coincidences and conflicts that are too easily resolved, and the prose is often unimpressive: “Should I break it off with him? Avoid the inevitable hurt when he left? The decision was agonizing.”
An engaging, if unevenly executed, cross-cultural romance.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-938749-38-4
Page Count: 285
Publisher: Enchanted Indie Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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