A sudsy insider’s look at the celebrity machine—and the cruel world it creates.
In her fourth novel, the author of The Devil Wears Prada (2003) considers what it would be like if your husband became a rock star. The short answer: not that great.
Everyone agrees Brooke and Julian are the real thing: madly in love and mutually supportive. Theirs is a marriage that could weather anything, except maybe the toxic storm of modern celebrity. Julian, a singer-songwriter, is in the final stages of recording his album for Sony. He’s still an unknown but has a following in Manhattan, which includes his wife Brooke, who first fell in love watching him sing at a dive bar. She works 60 hours a week as a nutritionist (at a hospital and part time at an elite girl’s school) all to help Julian achieve his dream. Then fame comes like an avalanche. A Tonight Show appearance pushes his single up the charts, and what follows—more TV appearances, a Vanity Fair cover, endless traveling, starlet photo ops—is just the stuff to weaken a marriage. Brooke becomes a nag, and meek Julian, manipulated by his sleazy manager, is transformed into an overworked brat (albeit one with a superior wardrobe). Brooke can’t take time off from work, so they spend weeks apart, and when they’re together, everything between them seems different. Then come the vicious articles in the gossip rags, insinuating there is trouble in their marriage, which unsurprisingly brings trouble to their union. The novel has difficulty convincing the reader that any sane woman would behave as Brooke does—refusing to take a sabbatical from her 60-hour work week, passing on a romantic Italian vacation, stubbornly refusing to live it up with her husband. By the end she realizes she is as much to blame for their relationship’s collapse as those compromising photos of Julian and a floozy at the Chateau Marmont. Only a miracle, or maybe some simple compromise, can get Brooke and Julian back together.
A sudsy insider’s look at the celebrity machine—and the cruel world it creates.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-3661-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Rather than settle for a coming-of-age or travails-of-immigrants story, Hosseini has folded them both into this searing...
Here’s a real find: a striking debut from an Afghan now living in the US. His passionate story of betrayal and redemption is framed by Afghanistan’s tragic recent past.
Moving back and forth between Afghanistan and California, and spanning almost 40 years, the story begins in Afghanistan in the tranquil 1960s. Our protagonist Amir is a child in Kabul. The most important people in his life are Baba and Hassan. Father Baba is a wealthy Pashtun merchant, a larger-than-life figure, fretting over his bookish weakling of a son (the mother died giving birth); Hassan is his sweet-natured playmate, son of their servant Ali and a Hazara. Pashtuns have always dominated and ridiculed Hazaras, so Amir can’t help teasing Hassan, even though the Hazara staunchly defends him against neighborhood bullies like the “sociopath” Assef. The day, in 1975, when 12-year-old Amir wins the annual kite-fighting tournament is the best and worst of his young life. He bonds with Baba at last but deserts Hassan when the latter is raped by Assef. And it gets worse. With the still-loyal Hassan a constant reminder of his guilt, Amir makes life impossible for him and Ali, ultimately forcing them to leave town. Fast forward to the Russian occupation, flight to America, life in the Afghan exile community in the Bay Area. Amir becomes a writer and marries a beautiful Afghan; Baba dies of cancer. Then, in 2001, the past comes roaring back. Rahim, Baba’s old business partner who knows all about Amir’s transgressions, calls from Pakistan. Hassan has been executed by the Taliban; his son, Sohrab, must be rescued. Will Amir wipe the slate clean? So he returns to the hell of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and reclaims Sohrab from a Taliban leader (none other than Assef) after a terrifying showdown. Amir brings the traumatized child back to California and a bittersweet ending.
Rather than settle for a coming-of-age or travails-of-immigrants story, Hosseini has folded them both into this searing spectacle of hard-won personal salvation. All this, and a rich slice of Afghan culture too: irresistible.Pub Date: June 2, 2003
ISBN: 1-57322-245-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
A somewhat fragmentary nocturnal shadows Jim Nightshade and his friend Will Halloway, born just before and just after midnight on the 31st of October, as they walk the thin line between real and imaginary worlds. A carnival (evil) comes to town with its calliope, merry-go-round and mirror maze, and in its distortion, the funeral march is played backwards, their teacher's nephew seems to assume the identity of the carnival's Mr. Cooger. The Illustrated Man (an earlier Bradbury title) doubles as Mr. Dark. comes for the boys and Jim almost does; and there are other spectres in this freakshow of the mind, The Witch, The Dwarf, etc., before faith casts out all these fears which the carnival has exploited... The allusions (the October country, the autumn people, etc.) as well as the concerns of previous books will be familiar to Bradbury's readers as once again this conjurer limns a haunted landscape in an allegory of good and evil. Definitely for all admirers.
Pub Date: June 15, 1962
ISBN: 0380977273
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1962
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