Glitter might make for an appetizing amuse-bouche but it's not enough for a satisfying meal.
The New Delhi edition of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous features a young heroine fashioned in the mold of Emma Woodhouse trying to swim free of the stifling fishbowl that is high-society India.
Surrounded by Edward Ruscha screen prints in her bedroom in Dad’s palatial mansion, Ania Khurana lacks for nothing. Until the writing muse strikes and Ania can finish her novel, the 25-year-old is perfectly content playing the role of matchmaker. Convinced that it was her arrangements that had her aunt successfully meet the man of her dreams, Ania next trains her sights on her friend Dimple. Trying to scrub her working-class roots clean, Dimple is Eliza Doolittle in Ania’s able hands, as the young public relations professional is sculpted to fit seamlessly into Delhi high society. But not all goes swimmingly in this comedy of errors as couples meet—and consciously uncouple—for all the wrong reasons. Meanwhile, the patriarch, Dileep Khurana, wrestles with his own demons, and Ania’s best matchmaking decisions frustratingly backfire. Rao’s lighthearted American debut will doubtless invite comparisons to the hit Crazy Rich Asians, but they are mostly unwarranted. Yes, Kevin Kwan's Asians drip with swank, but all that excess serves a linear plot that chugs full steam ahead. Here, however, the characters seem too fascinated by the scenery, and after a few too many dangling plotlines, the reader might not care that Ania chooses to “supplement her tofu extract face-cleaning capsules with seaweed skin patches and an oxygenated mist in a sheathed canister couriered to her from a hilltop in New Zealand.” The slack-jawed focus on the dazzle also misses an opportunity for more nuanced commentary about class instead of the cautious bites the novel delivers.
Glitter might make for an appetizing amuse-bouche but it's not enough for a satisfying meal.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-53994-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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