Dixie chicks and damn Yankees alike will enjoy seeing the world through Leelee’s eyes.
Patton debuts with a peachy-keen summer read about a Southern woman’s misadventures as a Vermont innkeeper.
Leelee Satterfield is a bona fide Memphis gal of the country-club variety, part of the ladies-who-lunch set and not at all eager to leave behind this privileged society. But when her gorgeous, sweet-talking husband Baker wants to buy an inn in Vermont and move up north with their two young girls, Leelee reluctantly acquiesces. She may be slightly spoiled, but she is devoted to her man right down to her well-manicured toes. Vermont proves to be everything she feared it would be—cold and lonely, for a start. As Leelee and Baker take on their misfit roles as innkeepers, predictable comedic chaos and challenges ensue; then an unexpected darker twist leaves Leelee alone and for the first time in charge of her own life. This adds weight to the otherwise just-for-kicks narrative and creates a nice balance: Leelee grapples with major life changes, but she’s also as fun and flaky as the peach cobbler she whips up in her inn’s restaurant. The book overflows with Southern charm, and although our heroine at times appears flighty and superficial, the obvious importance and profundity of her friendships and her love for her daughters are her saving graces. Leelee slowly comes around to her less fashion-conscious Vermont neighbors, heavy snowfall and actually lifting a finger to make a living. The appearance of a very cute new head chef adds a flirty element of romance, and her colorful best friends from Memphis provide a whirlwind of animated comedy. This sassy, lighthearted romp twists and turns toward a conclusion that is not at all foregone, but is immensely satisfying.
Dixie chicks and damn Yankees alike will enjoy seeing the world through Leelee’s eyes.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-55660-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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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