Talky, trivial, endless—and punctuated with silly horoscopes. Published in Britain in 2002, from the author of many similar...
Three Irish sisters, in and out of love.
Nessa is contented wife to Adam and mother to eight-year-old Jill; Cate works in sports-shoe marketing and is involved with sexy Finn Coolidge, a popular radio personality; and Bree is a tough-on-the-outside-creampuff-on-the-inside auto mechanic who secretly yearns for romance. The three are close and talk often (sometimes incessantly), but the usual sibling rivalries can surface now and then. Nessa is just too perfect, according to Cate, who is constantly fretting over hundreds of unvoiced worries. What if Finn doesn’t really love her? What if he becomes too successful when he moves from radio to TV? What if she got pregnant? Oh, no—she is pregnant! But she doesn’t want a baby. Correction: she doesn’t want this baby. How will she tell Finn? Maybe she should just have an abortion. Or maybe not. What if he finds out that she’s lying about it? Don’t men usually do the lying? And while she’s on the subject, does Nessa know that her perfect husband is cheating on her? Should Cate tell her? Bree has more or less resigned herself to a solitary life when Cupid’s wee arrow hits its mark, but she really can’t fall in love with a 45-year-old widower and father of three—can she? What do her sisters think? More confabulations ensue, with their mother Miriam joining the nattering chorus. Nessa confronts Adam, who admits to seeing not one but two women on the side—but only for sex (his words). She’s outraged, but does she still love him? Does he love her? Will he give up Annika and Regan for Nessa and Jill? The sisters pick each other’s lives to tiny pieces in their search for answers.
Talky, trivial, endless—and punctuated with silly horoscopes. Published in Britain in 2002, from the author of many similar tales.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7434-7042-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Downtown Press/Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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