Himes explores what could have been in this charming debut novel.
A stressed-out wife and mother finds that appreciating her life will require a fresh perspective.
Abbey Lahey is an overworked mother of two who feels her identity slipping away. Her relationship with her husband, Jimmy, a landscaper, isn’t as strong as it once was, and being on the “mommy track” at her PR firm means she no longer represents the most coveted clients. Now relegated to managing an exterminator’s account, she longs for a life just a little more glamorous. While flipping through a copy of Town & Country, she finds a photo of Alexander Collier van Holt, a man who asked her out on a date many years earlier. Discovering that he's now both rich and gorgeous, she begins to fantasize about the turn her life could have taken if she had only said yes to that date. Abbey often longs for a taste of the high life, and a few weeks earlier she had spent almost $600 on a Marc Jacobs purse she couldn’t afford. Unfortunately for Abbey, when Jimmy finds the bill, he demands that she return the bag. Under duress, she complies, though her frustration leads to clumsiness, and she takes a tumble over the escalator railing at Nordstrom. When she wakes up, she is no longer Abbey Lahey, but Abbey van Holt, thrown smack in the middle of the dream life she had imagined. Despite the money, designer goods, and handsome husband, Abbey soon sees fractures in the facade of this new alternate reality. While Mrs. Lahey packed a few extra pounds, Mrs. van Holt is fit, pampered, and nothing like Abbey. Could a different choice all those years ago really have changed her that much? Throughout the novel, Abbey longs to find herself in the midst of this glittering new life.
Himes explores what could have been in this charming debut novel.Pub Date: May 31, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-30573-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
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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