Noted for novels that subtly skew reality, Australian Booker Prize winner Carey (The Tax Inspector, 1991, etc.) now invents countries for his protagonist to illuminate in a story that only flirts with the big issues it raises. Set in a vague, near future, the two countries Carey creates, Efica and Voorstand, possess many suggestively familiar characteristics. In geography and landscape, Efica is vaguely Australasian, and Voorstand, while its language and history resemble that of South Africa, is culturally and militarily a power like the United States. The hero, Tristan Smith, born with numerous deformities, is the only son of Felicity Smith, a Voorstander who fled to Efica, where she headed a troupe of actors who performed political agitprop, as well as Shakespeare. His father is a young actor, Billy Millefleur, whose talents soon remove him to Voorstand, where he becomes a famous performer in the notorious Voorstand "Sirkus." This "Sirkus," which uses holograms and electronics and no animals — the Voorstanders worship animals, especially Bruder Mouse, a sort of spiritual Mickey Mouse — dominates Efica and the world culturally. Eficans are a poor people, "uncomfortable with dogma, suspicious of high-sounding rhetoric," who, though nominally independent, must accept Voorstand military installations on their territory and Voorstand influence on their politics. Tristan, reared by loyal theater folk after his mother's murder by a Voorstand operative, relates how he grows up to seek his father in Voorstand, confound his mother's enemies, as well as somehow become the great Efican actor he'd always believed to be his destiny. An ambitious book decked out with lots of imaginative finery, this picaresque tale promises the bite of an Orwellian satire but never delivers.
Pub Date: Feb. 14, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43888-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
With rich people behaving scandalously on every page, this lemon is juicy and delicious.
Weisberger (The Singles Game, 2016, etc.) gives rich-lit fans a second spinoff of her best-known novel, The Devil Wears Prada, shifting her lens from long-suffering Andrea Sachs to Emily Charlton, the snippy fashionista who worked as top assistant to Runway magazine’s hellish editor, Miranda Priestly.
A decade after leaving Runway, Emily has successfully reinvented herself as a celebrity stylist and image consultant specializing in crisis management. But it’s her own career that’s in jeopardy when a hotshot rival starts luring away Emily’s Hollywood clients with millennial social media superpowers. Emily needs a big win or she may as well pack it up and head back to Runway. Thankfully, her childhood friend Miriam Kagan has just the gig for her. Miriam recently moved to tony Greenwich, Connecticut, where former supermodel and current senator’s wife Karolina Hartwell is hiding out after a brush with the law. Something about Karolina’s DUI arrest just doesn’t add up, though. Miriam dusts off her Harvard law degree and Emily kicks into high gear, discovering their friend Karolina has been set up by her husband, an ambitious politician with his eye on the White House. Now the three friends must take him down. Having a kick-ass girl posse is not only great fun, but essential for survival in this town filled with moms obsessed with SoulCycle, trophy kids, and plastic surgery—including having their vaginas “custom fit” for their husbands. In one scene, a designer-clad mom hosts a sex-toy party where the constant drumbeat is fear that husbands will abandon wives who aren’t smokin’ hot and sexually available at all times. (Every sex toy is discussed in terms of how much pleasure it will bring the men.) Emily, Miriam, and Karolina pose a refreshing contrast to the Greenwich moms who all seem to be swimming in the extremely shallow end of the pool.
With rich people behaving scandalously on every page, this lemon is juicy and delicious.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7844-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This entry in a series for very new readers has few words and clear rhymes: “Popcorn. Popcorn./Put it in a pot./Popcorn. Popcorn./Get the pot hot.” In a Fauvist kitchen, a multicolored cast of characters—purple and blue dogs, a fuchsia cat, a boy and a girl (he’s African-American; she’s Latina) put those kernels in a big kettle. “Popcorn. Popcorn./Pop! Pop! Pop!/Popcorn. Popcorn./Stop! Stop! Stop!” The fluffy kernels spill out the door into the green and gold world, where other folk come to get their own bags full. “Popcorn. Popcorn./Get it while it’s hot./We are happy./We like it a lot.” Children who are just beginning to master the connection of word to object will adore this, and marvel that they can, indeed, read it. (Picture book. 5-9)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-15-201998-7
Page Count: 20
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
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