Thin and thinly written tale of second chances.
The travails of a newly single mother.
It never rains but it pours: Kennedy Smith’s selfish husband, Frank, has decided to become a yoga teacher and give up his lucrative law practice. And he’s dating his high school flame, Sunny the surfer, who’s sporting a big diamond only four months after Kennedy and Frank’s separation. The kids are upset: Amanda, five, refers to her father as a “dickhead”; and her half-sister Maya, fifteen, has decided to search for her biological father, Marco Rivera, even though she’s heard all about his problems with drugs. He and Kennedy split up years ago, and Kennedy would just as soon Maya not try to find him, but the stubborn daughter pooh-poohs her objections. Still, Kennedy has other things to worry about, like taking Frank’s Brooks Brothers suits to the Goodwill. And then? Living in the imaginary suburb of Homewood, outside of New York, just hasn’t prepared her for anything like this. Frank handled all the hard stuff, like highway driving, though Kennedy did sometimes take the Volvo as far as the nearest mall. And then there’s money. Her lifelong friend Jeannie offers her minimum wage in her adorable-thingies boutique, but Kennedy can’t meet her expenses selling tulips and dishcloths. So? Well, a pilgrimage to former haunts in the East Village might turn up Marco—and is it possible that McGlynn’s, the neighborhood bar owned and managed by her former flame, is still there? And are those the brawny biceps of Declan McGlynn as he pulls a pint of Guinness? The studly Irishman is right where she left him, the pub reassuringly ungentrified, still the kind of place where everybody knows your name—sort of like everybody knows the rest of this plot. Has Declan grown up enough to make a commitment? Will Marco bond with the daughter he abandoned? Will Kennedy find the happiness she seeks?
Thin and thinly written tale of second chances.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-6354-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Downtown Press/Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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