A heartwarming, spirit-lifting read just in time for beach season.
When Lolly Weller summons her daughter and nieces home to The Three Captains’ Inn, her announcement that she has been diagnosed with cancer is just one of many life-changing secrets to be told.
March’s debut novel uses the films of Meryl Streep to illuminate these women’s lives and to drive away the shadows that dim their happiness. After their mother and father die in a car crash, Isabel and June Nash are taken in by their Aunt Lolly, who lost her own husband in the same crash. Lolly’s daughter, Kat, gains instant sisters, but grief tinges the familial bonds. Now grown up, gathered back under Lolly’s roof, and drafted into Friday Movie Nights, these young women begin to reconsider the choices they have made—and the opportunities ahead. Like the heroine of Heartburn, Isabel is reeling from her husband’s affair. Handsome veterinarian Griffin might know the sting of infidelity, as well, and Isabel is certainly drawn to him for more than their shared pain. Kat has been all but betrothed to Oliver since they were toddlers, but she’s not sure if she is more ready to marry Oliver or to run off to a Paris patisserie. Defending Your Life makes her wonder if the real shame is in missing the opportunities life offers. Perhaps the exotic Dr. Matteo Viola is such an opportunity. Like the daughter in Streep’s Mama Mia!, June’s son, Charlie, has never known his real father. To help Charlie finish his family tree project, June agrees to once more search for John Smith, but maybe Henry Books is a truer father for Charlie. And she can’t deny her own attraction to him for much longer. But which movie mirrors Lolly’s past? What secret does she hide still? And why has she watched Out of Africa only once in her life?
A heartwarming, spirit-lifting read just in time for beach season.Pub Date: June 19, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5539-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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