Light urban romance no less enjoyable for its predictability.
Two advertising types fall in love even though they’ve never met and an ocean separates them.
There must be more than a few non-loathsome people in ad work, but from fiction like this, you’d never know it. The big firm here is a hotbed of suspicion and bitchy intrigue, not the kind of place you’d imagine its two basically goodhearted protagonists spending their days. The London half of the love equation is Suze Wilding, a designer, now 32 and somewhat at a loss romantically and professionally, so it’s little surprise that she jumps at the offer to do a job (and apartment) swap with an account executive in the New York office. The All-American Lloyd Rockwell can’t wait to get to London, either, though he’s a little disappointed that his controlling girlfriend Betsy wants to tag along. At first, everything goes swimmingly and each is delighted with the change of scenery (though homemaker-challenged Suze definitely gets the better of the apartment swap, thanks to Betsy’s manic decorating and cleaning), Suze getting a hot boyfriend in gadfly party promoter Nick Bianco and Lloyd just enjoying the Britishness of it all. Fate intervenes when a rather overexplained plot of corporate subterfuge enlists an unwitting Suze (not the brightest) in getting Lloyd summarily fired. Meanwhile, Suze finds out that Nick just might not be as dreamy as he seems, and Lloyd starts realizing (long after the reader has) how truly unpleasant a girlfriend Betsy is. In order to salvage Lloyd’s career and Suze’s soul, the two come together to work some ad magic on their bosses, and in the process of their lengthy phone conversations, spark up a friendship with promises of love. While hardly revealing any great depth to her main characters, Sisman nevertheless makes them into real people and not the clones of most chick-lit of this sort.
Light urban romance no less enjoyable for its predictability.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-452-28612-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
BOOK REVIEW
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