Sykes and Piazza must be connected with most of Hollywood on social media; it won’t be long before this story moves off the...
The glamorous world of fashion is met with a tech invasion in this satirical novel by fashion editor Sykes and editor/journalist Piazza (Love Rehab, 2014, etc.)
The fashion industry is notoriously cutthroat; The Devil Wears Prada taught us all about the nasty power struggles. In this story, though, the “devil” comes not in a dictatorial fashion editor but instead in the form of technology and the millennials who wield it with the goal of taking over the world, one click or “like” or Tweet at a time. Here, our likable protagonist is Imogen Tate, a 40-something fashion goddess and editor in chief who is just returning to her post after a six-month medical leave. Much to her surprise, she returns to Glossy magazine to discover her staff has been entirely replaced by young women strapped to devices that never stop beeping, no matter the hour. Imogen’s respected magazine has been turned into an app, and digital-only Glossy.com is now run by the hyperactive Eve Morton—Imogen’s old assistant, who left to get her MBA two years ago. Eve has returned a sociopath, a “techbitch” who labels Imogen the office dinosaur and laughs in her face when she doesn’t understand what a “gif” or a “dongle” is. As Eve becomes increasingly power hungry, Imogen realizes she must figure out how to adapt and take back what’s hers. This story is over-the-top, no doubt: it’s hard to believe the speed with which Glossy is revolutionized or just how tech-illiterate Imogen is, and Eve is simply a monstrosity. These exaggerated moments would translate well on the big screen, as would the portrayal of the generation gap and the endless, comedic tech struggles.
Sykes and Piazza must be connected with most of Hollywood on social media; it won’t be long before this story moves off the page.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53958-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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