Amusing in a Green Acres kind of way, but far too cute for comfort overall.
Cheesy US debut about a collection of misfits and losers who come together on a magical dairy farm in Ireland.
Lynch must have watched too many reruns of The Quiet Man and Waking Ned Devine for her own good, for she seems to have re-created the same nauseatingly enchanted Ireland that was inhabited by both of those high-fructose films. Basically, everything here revolves around Coolarney House, a dairy farm outside of Cork. Run by two old codgers named Corrie and Fee, Coolarney House produces the finest cheeses in Ireland, possibly the world (their Princess Grace Memorial Blue is particularly famed). One of the secrets of the Coolarney cheeses is that the cows are milked by vegetarians singing Rogers and Hammerstein songs. Naturally, Corrie and Fee have to scout afield for musical, meatless milkmaids and keep them happy once they find them, so Coolarney House soon acquires a reputation among its neighbors as a kind of commune of happy cranks. So much the better for Christopher “Kit” Stephens and Abbey Corrigan, both simultaneously hitting bedrock at opposite ends of the globe. Kit (a recently widowed stockbroker who has taken to the bottle hard since his wife and baby died six months before) has just been fired, while Abbey (a childless relief worker wasting her efforts on a South Seas island where the natives don’t want her help) has just found out that her jerk of a husband has been cheating on her. So off to Ireland both go, hoping to put life back together with some fresh air, fresh dairy, honest toil, and more than a bit of blarney. Naturally, neither knows the first thing about farming, but Coolarney House is, as we say, used to all sorts. There’s sure to be a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow.
Amusing in a Green Acres kind of way, but far too cute for comfort overall.Pub Date: July 2, 2003
ISBN: 0-446-53128-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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