A well-written novel, both sexy and romantic, with broad and inclusive representation.
When a straight California girl marries her lesbian Indian friend to help her get a green card, she didn't expect to fall in love.
Rachel is working as a glorified administrative assistant for a little-known production company and struggling to pay off her student loans. Pari is looking to make a job change that will threaten her temporary work visa. A marriage of convenience will let Pari stay in the U.S., and living in Pari's luxury condo will help Rachel pay down her student loans more quickly. Both women have demons: Rachel is recovering from a significant eating disorder while Pari is wrestling with her mother's theoretical and tentative acceptance of her sexuality. After Pari introduces her parents to Rachel via Skype, her mother informs her that she will fly in to help the two brides plan a traditional Hindu wedding—and while she's there, she'll be staying in Pari's guest room, where Rachel has been sleeping. Wedding traditions are carried out while Rachel and Pari get to know one another a little more, and Rachel finds herself drawn to Pari in ways she's unsure of how to process. Rachel is the narrator here, so the reader is a little more clued in about her negligent mom and low-key work stress than about what's going on with Pari's family dynamics or job situation. However, the romantic and sexual tension between the two is well-written and moves the story along nicely. The notable thing about this novel is its intentional inclusiveness. People of color and people with mental illnesses are not often represented in mainstream romance. That both are active parts of this story is a reason to celebrate.
A well-written novel, both sexy and romantic, with broad and inclusive representation.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2016
ISBN: 9781626494527
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Riptide
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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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