Chica lit that boasts strong narration but is hampered by some lackluster plotting.
Nieves-Powell, a writer, director and producer whose credits include the off-Broadway show Yo Soy Latina!, makes her fiction debut with this novel about a 30-something Latina mom looking for her true self amid the demands of work and family.
Idalis and her best-friend-since-childhood Selenis love to recall the great nights of their youth, spent salsa dancing at Club 90 in the Bronx. Dressed in stretch pants and bolero jackets, they ruled the dance floor. Now, 15 years later, they are mothers in Staten Island, dissatisfied with their husbands and their lives. Idalis, a secretary for a Manhattan ad agency, is legally separated from Manny. She loves him and his sexy ways, but his machismo—refusing to help with child care or housework—has made her doubt their marriage. Selenis, mother of three and caretaker of her increasingly demented mother, discovers that her husband is addicted to Internet porn. The women begin to despair. Then Idalis’s agency promotes her (her first task is working on a new Latino account) and she meets a handsome African-American banker. Could things be looking up? Not so fast. Idalis soon realizes that she is trading one set of problems for another. Her new beau has a bad habit of not calling when he says he will, and the Latino client wants the agency to market a Latina doll that is sure to tank. Should Idalis tell the client the truth about his product or should she keep her mouth shut to secure her promotion? This contrived plot point combines with other equally staged scenes (Manny’s oversexed barely legal girlfriend and Idalis’s boss’s preposterous lecture on reverse racism) to dampen what is the novel’s strength: its vibrant first-person narration, which really sings, as in the scene in which the girlfriends have a reunion night at Club 90, where they find a posse of old friends…and realize that things have changed.
Chica lit that boasts strong narration but is hampered by some lackluster plotting.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4281-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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