A decades-old, honest love story that never feels like merely a time capsule.
A Jersey Shore romance kindled in the swinging 1970s still smolders when old lovers come together in 2008.
Ronny Hopkins has long pined after his neighbor Katie Kline, the two young Belmar, New Jersey, natives often sharing time together over a little weed and “The White Album.” But Katie is a thoughtful girl, still affected by Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in ’68, moved to explore the issues of the tumultuous era she is growing up in, and charmed by the adult allure of New York but also Ronny’s father. Although their adulterous affair is quickly recognized as a mistake, their liaison leaves behind a handful of nude Polaroids of Katie, which Ronny finds hidden away with his father’s dirty magazines. Yet when Ronny confronts her, the two make love. But a relationship seems untenable, as Katie stays busy paying her dues writing obits for the Village Voice, graduating to chasing stories for the newspaper, while Ronny relaxes on the Jersey Shore, working as a lifeguard and spending his nights at local bars. Worse, Katie struggles with panic attacks, and Ronny’s resentment over her past and present experiences sometimes culminates in violent or jealous outbursts. Distance, family deaths, and other love interests soon pull them apart, but when they reunite for a day in 2008, the remnants of their time together—not naked photographs but his unanswered love letters—promise to remind them of what they once were. Bennett (Summer Mirrors, 2015, etc.) returns to Belmar to tell a warts-and-all love story spanning decades, deftly breaking down the small moments that form long, awkward relationships. The first half of the novel is presented in fast-paced snippets of character and conversation. The dialogue is quick and relies heavily on the two protagonists’ understanding of each other, with their interactions full of in-jokes, slang, and references to their time together. There are recognizable hallmarks to differentiate the ’70s from the modern day, with numerous nods to the music, drug culture, and celebrities, and in the 2000s, that period’s technology. The book’s second half, taking place over a shorter amount of time, slows the pace considerably but keeps the engrossing tale’s most important aspect alive, its delicate switching between Ronny’s and Katie’s points of view.
A decades-old, honest love story that never feels like merely a time capsule.Pub Date: June 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-947021-22-8
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Unsolicited Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
