Like a southern-fried meal, fatty and indulgent, and the more delicious for being so.
In a sequel to The Three Miss Margarets (2003), Shaffer employs all the components of a Lady’s Southern Novel—but creates something fresh and likable from the old tricks.
Laurel Selene McCready is as shocked as the rest of small-town Charles Valley, Ga., when she learns she is sole heir to Miss Peggy’s vast fortune: the whole of Garrison Gardens and Resort. Friend to the grand dame in the last years of her life (and with the other Miss Margarets, too: L’il Bit and Dr. Maggie), Laurel is now the company owner in a company town. Though with no father, a drunken mother (now dead), a poor-paying job (now lost) and a penchant for kicking it up herself, Laurel is hardly capable of running a multimillion-dollar concern, or so scheming lawyer Stuart Lawrence would have her believe. All Laurel has to do is sign a power of attorney and Stuart will make all Garrison Gardens decisions for her (top of the list is a big employee layoff and a drastic hike in health insurance premiums). Despite her daughter-like relationship with Miss Peggy, Laurel has always hated the Garrisons and the way they’ve strong-armed the town for generations. Now that she has the power to change things, she realizes she doesn’t have the know-how. Meanwhile, she becomes intrigued with the mysterious first Mrs. Garrison and the trunk of lacy costumes she finds hidden in the house. While Laurel’s moral dilemma is sincere, the story’s real spice comes from the nicely imagined subplot detailing the Depression era exploits of the Sunshine Sisters. A second-rate vaudeville act, Iva Claire, her mother Lily and foundling Tassie travel the circuit, dodge trouble and aim for the big time while surviving on hush money arriving regularly from Georgia. It becomes apparent that the Sunshine Sisters have everything to do with Garrison Gardens and, by the close, lies, secret identities and a murderer are revealed.
Like a southern-fried meal, fatty and indulgent, and the more delicious for being so.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-6062-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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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