by Paula Marantz Cohen ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 4, 2006
Cohen plods along the Austen road map, but the characters lack wit; they’re more often pathetic or mean than funny.
Cohen, whose contemporary version of Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen in Boca, 2002) was a delight, now tackles Persuasion in this strained romance about a high-school guidance counselor and the man she reluctantly threw over 13 years before.
Anne Ehrlich met Ben Cutler when she was a senior at Columbia and he was a bookish travel agent from Queens. Though deeply in love, she broke up with him because her family, rich Westchester Jews of German descent, didn’t approve of his plebeian background and lack of obvious prospects. Now she’s a 34-year-old unmarried guidance counselor at a Scarsdale, N.Y., high school, where she helps students apply to college. Cohen offers astute social commentary on the college admissions process, specifically the wooing strategies that occur between high-school seniors and the colleges of their choice. Anne’s family is now financially strapped because her father has run through the family fortune he inherited from Anne’s mother, who died when Anne was very young. To pay her father’s debts, Anne is trying to sell the large but increasingly rundown family home in which she was raised by her maternal grandmother, Winnie, a crotchety but lovable grandame whose disapproval of Ben influenced Anne. Out of the blue, a certain Jonathan Cutler transfers to the school; he has been living abroad with his single mother and his Uncle Ben, now a famous travel-book author. Although Ben is engaged to his Danish assistant, a pleasant woman named Kirsten, and despite some slight diversions with Anne’s other suitors, there is little question where things are headed.
Cohen plods along the Austen road map, but the characters lack wit; they’re more often pathetic or mean than funny.Pub Date: April 4, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-32502-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2004
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
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