Lively look at commitment and love, in need of a luminous set of heroines.
Batch of 30-something Brits wrestle with the question of marriage.
Stevie Jonson has done what seems to be impossible for many of her peers: get a commitment from her boyfriend, Jez. At 34, Stevie had begun to wonder if she’d ever walk down the aisle or start a family. Now it looks like all her dreams are about to come true. As the wedding day nears, niggling doubts begin to pop into Stevie’s head. To exacerbate matters, an old flame wanders back into her life and Stevie starts to think that maybe Jez isn’t her perfect match. She doesn’t listen to her intuition; instead Stevie plods along with the wedding. Her fears prove valid when she and Jez have a horrific honeymoon. Her groom can’t keep his eyes off Katy, an old rival of Stevie’s, who happens to be on holiday at the same Thai resort that Jez picked for the honeymoon. Katy appreciates Jez’s attention as her own boyfriend, Seb, has started to lose interest in their long-term relationship. And of course, Katy wants what Stevie has—the ring. Couples are drawn together and ripped apart as these privileged Brits try to find happiness. This engaging second effort from Williams (The Yummy Mummy, 2007) is packed with juicy twists of fate and karmic encounters. It seems everyone in Stevie’s circle has questions about their partners—they universally suffer from “the grass is always greener syndrome.” Shunning the traditional boy meets girl and lives happily ever after formula, Williams treats readers to second chances and hard-won successes on the battlefields of love. Yet while the author’s writing has become more confident and her plotting richer, Williams still needs to polish her stereotypical characters.
Lively look at commitment and love, in need of a luminous set of heroines.Pub Date: June 10, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4013-0232-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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
BOOK REVIEW
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