From period-romance writer Blair (A World of Difference, 1989, etc.), an engaging contemporary story that tips its hat to politics, women's history, and feminism. When 12-year-old Kate Ballard's beautiful, feckless mother, Sydney, runs off with her own cousin, Kate vows never to let love wreak havoc in her life. She's rescued then by a fairy godmother (though sometimes witch) in the form of her maternal grandmother, Polly Benedict, imposing matriarch of a rich, powerful southern clan and mistress of the beautiful South Carolina estate, Kel Regis. Polly was so disgusted with her own daughter (for the wanton escapades of her youth, which included sex with her brother) that she ignored Kate for the first 14 years of her life. But after Sydney's defection, she finds in brilliant, bookish Kate a young life she hopes she can direct right into the White House. Kate warms to the imperious, meddling old woman, but is determined to follow her own destiny. She attends graduate school at Oxford, where she meets Win Talley, a handsome, charismatic young actor whose star is in the ascent. When the two marry, Polly is furious and Kate is exiled from Kel Regis. She puts her career on hold to help Win with his; gradually she realizes she needs work of her own and begins a book that is earmarked for the bestseller list. Her own TV show follows; the marriage breaks up; then Kate becomes a well-known feminist spokeswoman, has a couple of unsatisfactory romances, and is finally accepted back into the family fold. Through Polly's manipulations, she becomes president of her old alma mater, Wakefield College, where she'll endure some rocky times—but emerge triumphant. Interesting, full-bodied characters and an entertaining storyline: a modern romance with a reassuring, old-fashioned ending. (Literary Guild Dual Selection for August)
Pub Date: June 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-553-08924-2
Page Count: 486
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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