White girl problems.
A down-on-her-luck NYC girl gets a taste of the limelight when she becomes personal assistant to a rock-star relative.
McLaughlin and Kraus (Nanny Returns, 2009, etc.) offer up another fable about a plucky 20-something beleaguered by an unstable employer. Their latest entry feels about seven years out of step with the times, as the crazy in the house this time is a Britney-esque pop star whose life is leaning dangerously towards the toxic. Our everygirl narrator is Logan Wade, who was offered the personal assistant gig by her cousin Kelsey when the young singer was first starting out. Now, Kelsey has become one of the world’s biggest celebrities, while Logan is living a half-life in the city with an arduous job, a selfish sort-of-boyfriend and a growing sense of dissatisfaction with her life. “Suddenly the life I’ve spent the last decade building is losing relevance, the veneer I’ve run frantic circles to secure showing its cracks like a puzzle held over a flashlight,” Logan says, in a characteristically overly wordy and featherweight observation from a generally impassive character. Even when the authors shoehorn Logan into the most glamorous and outrageous situations—and there are many, ranging from video shoots in exotic locales to flu-ridden blockbuster concerts to steamy Italian liaisons—she never seems to join the circus, just comments endlessly on it. Kelsey is a far more interesting collection of self-indulgences, poor choices and disconnects from reality, but her character is so fully drawn from real life that her troubles seem a bit clichéd. There are the paparazzi photos, her ill-advised romance with a sleazy backup dancer, a host of mood disorders and the helicopter parents who want to micromanage their daughter’s career, not to mention her life. The story shudders from plot point to plot point. Harmless, yes, but McLaughlin and Kraus flow better when their stories are more diabolical and less diatribe.
White girl problems.Pub Date: June 12, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4391-8818-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 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.
