Entertaining fluff—and sure to sell.
Clothes make the man . . . and the man makes the woman.
Or so thinks Seattle journalist Tracie Higgins, who keeps herself busy writing feature stories for a local newspaper, hanging out with an assortment of comical pals, and letting her slacker boyfriend Phil take advantage of her. When Tracie complains to her longtime best friend Jon, he wonders why women always fall for users and losers like Phil. Jon is a great guy who always does the right thing—from making a modest fortune in the city’s computer industry to visiting each of his several stepmothers and his own mom on Mother’s Day. But since he can’t get a date, he asks Tracie on a whim to make him over. She eagerly complies, tossing out his dorky khakis and company T-shirts in favor of unbuttoned black leather shirts and torn jeans, insisting that he get a sexy, spiky haircut, dubbing him Johnny in the name of ersatz badness, and setting him loose on the unsuspecting female population of Seattle. After some initial strikeouts, Jon hits pay dirt with Tracie’s buddy Beth, who announces some amazing news the very next morning: Jon is fabulous between the sheets. Tracie finally wises up and realizes what she’s been overlooking all these years. She’s in love. But will Jon believe it when a tell-all account of his makeover and subsequent bungling appears in the newspaper? Fresh and funny for the most part, although Goldsmith (The First Wives Club, 1992, etc.) supplies enough trendy cuteness to fill a shopping mall. And the story’s central conceit—that an intelligent, sensitive, kind, attractive, hard-working, loyal, rich guy who’s also great in bed would somehow be invisible to the opposite sex—boggles the mind and begs the question any post-teen female reader would scream at cheerfully oblivious Tracie: Are you crazy?
Entertaining fluff—and sure to sell.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-525-94558-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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