A lengthy but engaging romance boosted by a fun main character and her baseball-playing love interest.
In Anderson’s debut novel, an aspiring actress learns to put herself first as she navigates relationships with an egotistical playwright and a New York Yankee.
Thirty-three-year-old Samantha enjoys salsa dancing, lives with a roommate in Hackensack, New Jersey, and pursues an acting career in New York City. Sam believes that “all men fall into one of three categories: taken, gay, or assholes,” so she’s surprised to find that the guy teaching her acting class doesn’t seem to be any of these. Alan is an actor and writer who’s connected in the Broadway scene. He’s under pressure to rewrite his play, so Sam supports him as his confidant, co-writer, and biggest fan. However, when his play is finally produced, he lets another girl get cast in the lead role instead of fighting for Sam. Finally, after Sam spends two years playing second fiddle to Alan’s ego, he dumps her. Instead of letting it derail her, however, she starts writing her own one-woman play, trains to qualify for a marathon, and looks for a new apartment in New York. Just when she thinks she’s done with men, she meets none other than Darren James, the star New York Yankee baseball player, at a salsa club, and they dance the night away. When Sam’s show is produced and her relationship with Darren becomes serious, she finds herself forced to choose between the Yankee and her career. Anderson tells a familiar story of a woman looking for love and satisfaction in the big city, but certain aspects of the story are refreshingly new. Sam is a teetotaling commuter, for example, rather than a Cosmopolitan-drinking Manhattanite. Although she’s juvenile at times and puts up with poor treatment from her boyfriend, Sam has a solid backbone, and she’s a good friend to those in her life. Anderson’s humorous prose fairly accurately describes being young and single in New York (roommates, commuting, bad dates, working a day job). Although the book is long, readers will enjoy its element of escapism. After all, what woman doesn’t dream of dating a Derek Jeter type?
A lengthy but engaging romance boosted by a fun main character and her baseball-playing love interest.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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