Madcap nights of love among the lycanthropes.
Hayter sets aside her Robin Hudson female detective series (The Chelsea Girls Murders, 2000) to profile one Annie Engel: a mousy secretary by day, a werewolf by night.
Fading newsman Sam Deverell lucks into a story about a Mad Dog Murder and a victim attacked during a full moon outside the Carnivore restaurant in the Meat-Packing District; he’s the only reporter to grab a video of the body. Werewolf Jim, a ghostwriter by day, keeps his lycanthropic changes at bay by taking doses of ketamine with an intravenous drip and sleeping during the full moon, but he’s charged up by the Meat-Packing District murder and, going off ketamine, feels euphoric. Legal secretary Annie, a vegetarian who works for Synergy Enterprises Group, wakes up with blood on her chest, meat lodged in her teeth, nausea, a meatlike lump in her vomit, her purse lost, and her window broken in (by herself). Annie also finds all her senses sharpened at work. She can hear far-off conversations beyond the normal range of hearing, and she’s developing soft blond fur all over her body. Then there’s rudeness, distemper, lack of table manners. She finds herself four-footed and scampering over rooftops. Annie the werewolf tears out throats, then leaves her dead victims, seemingly without having refreshed herself on their blood or bodies—although she does find herself feeling much better by day, despite not quite remembering what she did the night before. According to Dr. Marco Potenza, who runs a clinic for fee-paying werewolves who want to be sedated during dangerous periods of the full moon (and is himself a werewolf), Annie suffers from Lyconthropic Metamorphic Disorder. When two Syn-GEN employees are murdered by the Mad Dog Killer, Annie wonders whether she can ever have a normal life again. The climax, Operation Harvest Moon, finds wolves scampering over many roofs in a wild chase.
Madcap nights of love among the lycanthropes.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-4000-4743-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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