by Paula Marantz Cohen ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 13, 2014
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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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