Cohen is no Jane Austen, but her latest update on the Marriage Plot is a light romantic comedy featuring witty commentary on...
If Jane Austen’s heroines can find true love within the confines of their small English villages, why can’t a single New Yorker locate Mr. Right among the residents of her large Upper West Side apartment building?
Suzanne Davis is 34 years old and a technical writer with a boring, albeit undemanding, job and “an apartment the size of a shoebox on West 76th Street in New York City.” Fed up with online dating, she decides to think small and look for “a soul mate in my own backyard.” She pursues this goal like an anthropologist, staking out a spot on the building’s playground to observe the moms and children at play, which leads to an invitation to a book discussion where she is introduced to some potential suitors. Suzanne is a hilarious, self-deprecating, rather unreliable narrator who, like the best Austen heroines, is the last to reach the obvious conclusions about her own love life. After a disastrous affair with one building resident and an almost unbearably meet-cute episode with another, a bout of cancer is just the impetus she needs to reassess her life and her priorities and even mend fences with her difficult and fault-finding mother. This use of cancer as a plot device comes off as a little glib and predictable, though the reader senses Cohen (Jane Austen in Scarsdale, 2006, etc.) is mocking the cliché even as she makes use of it. This Austen-inspired novel is highly self-referential; not only does Suzanne openly acknowledge the Austen connection throughout, one character even makes direct reference to one of Cohen’s earlier novels during a book discussion about Pride and Prejudice. While Cohen keeps her tongue planted firmly in cheek, she sometimes seems to fall back on tropes and lazy shorthand from a slightly earlier era. (Do single Manhattanites still consume Lean Cuisines nightly? Is a “split-level in New Jersey” still shorthand for suburban drudgery?)
Cohen is no Jane Austen, but her latest update on the Marriage Plot is a light romantic comedy featuring witty commentary on contemporary life, enriched by a funny, flawed and likable heroine.Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-58988-095-5
Page Count: 277
Publisher: Paul Dry Books
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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