An excellent read, especially for those who love cooking, romance, and realistically poignant LGBT themes.
In Bailey’s debut novel, a blossoming relationship between a gay man and his allegedly straight neighbor begins through the art of cooking.
Pierre Jackson moves to Toronto from Detroit to be with his wealthy news anchor fiance, Dre. But after they have a dramatic fight, Pierre spends some time living on his own and enrolls in a French cooking class. His messy apron quickly catches the eye of his new neighbor, Vijay Khakwani, who invites him to come to his apartment every Thursday night to teach him how to cook. Pierre is instantly attracted, but due to Vijay’s swaggering, “straight-boy” persona, he tries to subdue his emotions as they develop a strong friendship. Vijay has his own problems, particularly with his overbearing, high-powered lawyer mother, who wants him to follow through on an arranged marriage to a woman. He tries to channel his frustration into meditation and studying the teachings of Buddhism, but he soon becomes overwhelmed with confusion about his true feelings for Pierre. The plot becomes increasingly absorbing when Dre reappears in Pierre’s life in an attempt to repair their relationship; meanwhile, Vijay tries desperately to suppress his attraction to men during a complicated identity crisis. Bailey’s novel is smart, captivating, and hilarious, seasoned with spicy moments of intimacy, hip and witty dialogue, and a hefty serving of drama. It tackles a wide range of subjects, including difficult-to-navigate gray areas of LGBT relationships, Buddhist philosophy, cultural identity, and the subtle yet prevailing homophobic tendencies of a supposedly welcoming modern society. The author beautifully melds the art of cooking with rising romantic desire and also examines engaging cultural dynamics as Pierre, an African-American man from Detroit, teaches Vijay, an Indo-Guyanese man who’s fairly far-removed from his cultural heritage, how to cook and enjoy traditional Indian cuisine. Also, although Pierre and Dre move to Toronto in order to be legally married, Dre still harbors anxieties about his family’s homophobia, and he worries that he’ll be treated differently at his workplace as an openly gay man. Although the novel’s ending is a surprise, readers won’t be disappointed.
An excellent read, especially for those who love cooking, romance, and realistically poignant LGBT themes.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A contemporary equivalent of This Side of Paradise or Vile Bodies, and another solid building-block in one of contemporary...
A first US appearance of a novel originally published in 1987, this crisp portrayal of “flaming youth” in the late 1960s proves one of Murakami’s most appealing—if uncharacteristic—books.
Best known to us as the comic surrealist-symbolist author of such rousing postmodernist fare as A Wild Sheep Chase (1989), Murakami is also a highly intelligent romantic who feels the pangs of his protagonist Toru Watanabe’s insistent sexual and intellectual hungers and renders them with unsparing clarity (the matter-of-fact sexual frankness here seems unusual for a Japanese novel, even a 1987 one).Toru’s narrative of his student years, lived out against a backdrop of ongoing “campus riots,” focuses on the lessons he learns from relationships with several highly individual characters, two of them women he simultaneously loves (or thinks he loves). Mercurial Naoko, who clearly perceives the seeds of her own encroaching madness (“It’s like I’m split in two and playing tag with myself”), continues to tug away at Toru’s emotions even after she enters a sanatorium. Meanwhile, coy fellow student Midori tries to dispel shadows cast by her parents’ painful deaths by fantasizing and simulating—though never actually experiencing—sex with him. Other perspectives on Toru’s hard-won assumption of maturity are offered by older student Nagasawa (“a secret reader of classic novels,” and a compulsive seducer); Naoko’s roommate Reiko, a music teacher (and self-styled interpreter of such Beatles’ songs as the one that provides Murakami’s evocative title) who’s perhaps also her lesbian lover; and the specter of Toru’s boyhood friend Kizuki, a teenaged suicide. There’s a lot of talk about books (particularly Fitzgerald’s and Hesse’s) and other cultural topics, in a blithely discursive and meditative story that’s nevertheless firmly anchored to the here and now by the vibrant immediacy of its closely observed characters and their quite credibly conflicted psyches and libidos.
A contemporary equivalent of This Side of Paradise or Vile Bodies, and another solid building-block in one of contemporary fiction’s most energetic and impressive bodies of work.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70402-7
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Very slow off the mark, though once blackmail and murder enter the picture, Scottoline moves things along with her customary...
In Scottoline’s latest family-centered thriller (Accused, 2013, etc.), Jake Buckman lets son Ryan drive the family car on a back road. Very bad idea.
The car hits someone, and she’s dead. Faced with the prospect of his teenager’s life being ruined, Jake tells him to get back in the car, and they drive away. “[D]on’t tell Mom,” Jake warns; he loves his wife, but Pam has the personality you’d expect of a superior court judge (judgmental), and their marriage is still recovering from Jake’s decision to start his own business, which has made him a mostly absentee husband and father. He’s now “one of the top-ten ranked financial planners in southeastern Pennsylvania,” though his planning skills aren’t evident as Jake ineptly tries to cover their tracks. He also has a terrible time keeping his son from confessing once they learn that the dead girl is Ryan’s high school classmate Kathleen Lindstrom. It takes more than 100 pages for the plot to involve anything other than Jake’s nerves, Pam’s suspicions and Ryan’s guilty wails, all of which are believable but not very interesting. Sleazy blackmailer Lewis Deaner livens things up, especially after he turns up murdered. If the police find those cellphone pictures Deaner had of Jake and Ryan at the scene of the crime, Jake will be a suspect. And once Ryan has blurted out the truth to his mother, furious Pam might be just as happy to see Jake in jail. The killer’s identity isn’t much of a surprise, since he’s the only character with any individual traits apart from the Buckmans and the cops, but the final twist comes out of nowhere, 10 pages from the end.
Very slow off the mark, though once blackmail and murder enter the picture, Scottoline moves things along with her customary professionalism, if scant credibility.Pub Date: April 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-01009-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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