by Steven Lubliner ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 9, 2016
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Lubliner (A Child’s Christmas in Queens, 2014) takes on presidential politics in this satirical novel.
Fillmore Pipp is an inoffensive Democratic president, notable only for the way in which his supporters project their feelings onto him: “Fillmore Pipp was the candidate of the well-spoken people who not only knew where they stood but took the lazy scenic route to get there.” It’s particularly off-brand, then, when Pipp makes a sex tape and allows his partner to keep a copy. His real dread is that if the tape is publicly released, America will learn of the smallness of his reproductive anatomy. It’s an urgent danger, as the Republican challenger to his re-election campaign is the hippie-turned–male enhancement guru Mel Kriegman, who’s known to be particularly well-endowed. Even worse, Pipp’s sex tape co-star, Mandy, gets recruited by a malcontent blogger to mount a third-party candidacy at the head of a movement known as the “Brown Baggers,” who symbolically express their dissatisfaction with the status quo by defecating in public while extending both middle fingers. The three-way contest quickly turns into a race to the bottom as each candidate attempts to sift through the muck to find the soul of the American voter. As sophomoric and scatological as this novel’s premise may sound, Lubliner’s America doesn’t seem so foreign from our own—particularly in the current election cycle. The prose is sharp and playful (“He was marked to be a leader of men because he was unfit for anything else”), and the author manages to sell ideas that would certainly fall flat in less able hands. The book benefits from its brevity (it’s only 120 pages long) and the fact that Lubliner keeps the plot skipping along quicker than readers can overthink its ridiculousness. Those looking to dive deeper into presidential campaign madness—rather than escape from it—could do much worse than this comic interpretation of our ever devolving politics. A slim, funny satire of America’s electoral culture.
Pub Date: July 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5309-7129-9
Page Count: 132
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2004
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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