Entertaining over-the-top melodrama, with a nonsensical plot pitting an appealing pair of lovers against a dastardly villain.
The adventurous romance of Gabriella Martinez and Richard Harrison continues in Alonso-Sierra’s follow-up to The Coin (2014).
Talented and lovely Gabriella has illustrated a medieval manuscript, The Book of Hours, scheduled for auction at Christie’s in London. The book’s artistry attracts vile Arnold Wickeham, who hopes to coerce Gabriella to sell it to him pre-auction for 250,000 pounds. Meanwhile, Gabriella’s personal life is in turmoil. She’s in love with Richard Harrison, an American intelligence operative who once saved her life; at the time, Gabriella had been reluctant to end the relationship with her husband, Roberto. After a ghastly car accident involving a sanitation truck, comatose Roberto is on life support, jeopardizing the future of his company. Roberto’s affections also wavered; he was en route to meet his lover when the mishap occurred, on the same day Gabriella finally asked for a divorce. As Wickeham’s threats against Gabriella mount, Richard returns to her side. There’s no denying their mutual attraction or that her son, Luisito, looks like him. As the auction date approaches, Wickeham will stop at nothing—including brake tampering, kidnapping, and torture—to secure The Book of Hours. Still, Gabriella adamantly refuses to give in. Elsewhere, scheming April Cranfield, who wants Richard back in her bed, plans to entrap him and bear his child. Sierra’s novel is a lively mix of adventure, drama, and an affecting romantic reunion, marred by some awkward prose: “Gabriella actually owed Roberto a grateful ‘thanks’ for plopping the overflow drop into the bucket of her restraint.” At times, the story feels like an episode of daytime drama, with a wicked but not very bright villain squaring off against a man and a woman heroically determined and cued for rescue. The biggest stumbling block is the premise: it’s obvious Wickeham is behind the threats against Gabriella. He might have used his quarter-million pounds to hire a thief and walk quietly away with the manuscript.
Entertaining over-the-top melodrama, with a nonsensical plot pitting an appealing pair of lovers against a dastardly villain.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-0986209505
Page Count: 314
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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