Weisberger’s third effort (Everyone Worth Knowing, 2005, etc.), with the requisite girls’ nights out and disappointing men,...
Three single gals on the cusp of turning the big 3-0 shake up their romantic lives and deal with the consequences.
That Adriana, Emmy and Leigh have remained close since college is a testament to the strength of their bond, since personality-wise they could not be more different. Leigh is a neurotic book editor, Emmy is a financially struggling cooking aficionado and Adriana is a Brazilian knockout living off her rich parents in a swanky penthouse. After serial-monogamist Emmy is suddenly dumped by her longtime beau Duncan (for the personal trainer she hired for him), Adriana insists that the only way Emmy can get over him is by having torrid affairs with foreign men. Easy for the gorgeous Adriana to say. Emmy counters that if she can “slut out” then unrepentant man-eater Adriana has to, for once in her life, have a committed relationship. Let the games begin! Well, at least for Adriana and Emmy. Leigh, for her part, has a job she loves and a “perfect” boyfriend, hunky sportscaster Russell. Or is he perfect? When he proposes, she knows she should be happy, but she instead finds herself getting tangled up with bad boy novelist Jesse Chapman, who happens to be married. Meanwhile, Emmy, courtesy of her new job scouting restaurant locations, embarks on her erotic adventures, while Adriana nabs a slightly dorky big-time Hollywood director she struggles to remain faithful to. She also meets a magazine editor who, impressed by her effortless ways with men, gives Adriana her own advice column, “The Brazilian Girl’s Guide to Man Handling,” which sounds a lot like a sexed-up version of The Rules. The narrative is choppy (the book would have benefited from more editing), and the characters’ obsession with youth, as well as their displays of jealousy and cattiness, are tiring.
Weisberger’s third effort (Everyone Worth Knowing, 2005, etc.), with the requisite girls’ nights out and disappointing men, has some well-observed passages—and Adriana is a hoot—but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before, many times.Pub Date: June 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9019-4
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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