A witty, droll foray into fiction for Rudner (Naked Beneath My Clothes, 1992).
Can a brunette comedian forgive her blond best friend for stealing the show? Eventually.
Heading for New York from Miami after her mother’s death from cancer, teenaged Mindy Solomon hopes to make it big on Broadway—but changes plans after two men who were supposed to catch her during a dance routine . . . didn’t. The injuries force her to hang up her tap shoes and turn to comedy, delighted to find that she has a gift for making people laugh. Meanwhile, beautiful Ursula Duran, illegitimate daughter of a self-absorbed shrew who neglected her, struggles to find work as a model and suddenly skyrockets to fame when her heretofore-indifferent mother, Eva, wakes up, smells the money—and appoints herself manager. She arrives on the scene just in time to rescue Ursula from the amorous designs of Brandon Holmes, former advertising exec turned TV honcho. Yes, he’s Ursula’s long-lost father . . . just one of many unpleasant surprises life has in store for both women. Mindy’s road to success is equally bumpy, but guest appearances on David Letterman and other shows get her noticed, and soon she’s tapped for the lead in a new sitcom. Unfortunately, loathsome studio head Leonard Felk thinks that blonds are better—and Ursula’s mother Eva has been hanging around with him, displaying her enormous, brand-new boobs and other expensive plastic surgery. Mindy is aghast to discover that she’s been demoted to writer and that Ursula will star. She knows her friend can’t act—but she can’t help being wildly jealous. Mindy ends up in bed with Ursula’s ex-husband, a comedian—and gets pregnant. Understandably, she can’t bring herself to tell Ursula—and then a car accident puts her former friend into a coma. Stricken with guilt, Mindy makes a bedside confession, and . . . Ursula wakes up.
A witty, droll foray into fiction for Rudner (Naked Beneath My Clothes, 1992).Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2001
ISBN: 0-7434-4261-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
This is the sort of book that stirs one so deeply that it is almost impossible to attempt to convey the impression it leaves. It is the story of today's Exodus, of America's great trek, as the hordes of dispossessed tenant farmers from the dust bowl turn their hopes to the promised land of California's fertile valleys. The story of one family, with the "hangers-on" that the great heart of extreme poverty sometimes collects, but in that story is symbolized the saga of a movement in which society is before the bar. What an indictment of a system — what an indictment of want and poverty in the land of plenty! There is flash after flash of unforgettable pictures, sharply etched with that restraint and power of pen that singles Steinbeck out from all his contemporaries. There is anger here, but it is a deep and disciplined passion, of a man who speaks out of the mind and heart of his knowledge of a people. One feels in reading that so they must think and feel and speak and live. It is an unresolved picture, a record of history still in the making. Not a book for casual reading. Not a book for unregenerate conservative. But a book for everyone whose social conscience is astir — or who is willing to face facts about a segment of American life which is and which must be recognized. Steinbeck is coming into his own. A new and full length novel from his pen is news. Publishers backing with advertising, promotion aids, posters, etc. Sure to be one of the big books of the Spring. First edition limited to half of advance as of March 1st. One half of dealer's orders to be filled with firsts.
Pub Date: April 14, 1939
ISBN: 0143039431
Page Count: 532
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1939
The fine Israeli writer Yehoshua (Open Heart, 1996, etc.) makes a lengthy journey into the year 999, the end of the first millennium. Indeed, it is the idea of a great journey that is the heart of the story here. Ben Attar, a Moroccan Jewish merchant has come a long distance to France to seek out his nephew and former partner Abulafia. Ben Attar, the nephew, and a third partner, the Muslim Abu Lutfi, had once done a lucrative business importing spices and treasures from the Atlas Mountains to eager buyers in medieval Europe. But now their partnership has been threatened by a complex series of events, with Abulafia married to a pious Jewish widow who objects vehemently to Ben Attar’s two wives. Accompanied by a Spanish rabbi, whose cleverness is belied by his seeming ineffectualness; the rabbi’s young son, Abu Lutfi; the two wives; a timorous black slave boy, and a crew of Arab sailors, the merchant has come to Europe to fight for his former partnership. The battle takes place in two makeshift courtrooms in the isolated Jewish communities of the French countryside, in scenes depicted with extraordinary vividness. Yehoshua tells this complex, densely layered story of love, sexuality, betrayal and “the twilight days, [when] faiths [are] sharpened in the join between one millennium and the next” in a richly allusive, languorous prose, full of lengthy, packed sentences, with clauses tumbling one after another. De Lange’s translation is sensitively nuanced and elegant, catching the strangely hypnotic rhythms of Yehoshua’s style. As the story draws toward its tragic conclusion—but not the one you might expect—the effect is moving, subtle, at once both cerebral and emotional. One of Yehoshua’s most fully realized works: a masterpiece.
Pub Date: Jan. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-48882-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
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