by Patricia Caviglia ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
Rich girl and poor boy forge a believable relationship.
A young woman tries to break away from her mean-girl past and controlling father in this novel.
Diana Rainville first appeared to readers as a minor character in Caviglia’s (Masks, 2011) previous book, best friend of Rebecca Jacobs, who finally confronted her about her selfish, boyfriend-stealing ways. Now 22, Diana has no friends left, although she’s lately begun to develop a conscience and a wish to gain independence from her wealthy, domineering father, Mathieu, 52. Freedom, though, proves difficult when Mat sabotages her job search, ensuring she’ll have to live at home and work for him at Montreal’s Rainville Digital Media. While shooting video footage for a client, a sports store expanding its inventory to skateboards, Diana runs into high school acquaintance Ron Pearl, once known for his piercings. Now he sports only one and has become taller and more manly. When not skateboarding, Ron drives a taxi to support his mother, who is dying of cancer in a hospice. Despite their differences, he and Diana are cautiously attracted to each other, and they have parental abandonment in common: Ron’s father took off when his mother was diagnosed, and Diana’s mother left when she was small. (Arianne Deschamps has actually been writing letters to her daughter for years, a secret shared between Mat and Diana’s older brother.) When Ron seemingly leaves Diana in the lurch, she’s tempted to flee to her father, who hates the guy, for support—but it’s time for family secrets to come to light. Caviglia creates three-dimensional characters who are realistically mixed up, and the reasons for parental desertion are complex. But not all of the book’s psychology is well-observed; hoarding—Ron’s affliction—is a serious disorder, not one easily solved with a good shot of determination. The tale is well-paced, but the plot copycats Masks, which also features a young woman whose chief conflict is with an angry, dictating father, who also tries to make her date the man of his choice. Since the characters don’t come from cultural backgrounds that would help explain this pattern, the conflict is a little unconvincing, and doubly so for this second outing.
Rich girl and poor boy forge a believable relationship.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Share your opinion of this book
More by Patricia Caviglia
BOOK REVIEW
by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Awards & Accolades
Likes
138
Our Verdict
GET IT
New York Times Bestseller
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Share your opinion of this book
More by Max Brooks
BOOK REVIEW
by Max Brooks
More About This Book
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Awards & Accolades
Likes
33
Our Verdict
GET IT
Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2015
Kirkus Prize
winner
National Book Award Finalist
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
Share your opinion of this book
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
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.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.