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
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 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
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