by Sue Margolis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 7, 2003
Quick in pace and often very funny.
Slapdash farce from the author of Spin Cycle (2001, etc.).
Rebecca Fine, newly appointed and very nervous beauty columnist for the Daily Vanguard, is stuck in traffic and about to miss her first meeting at the paper. What better time to apply her mascara—and just as she does, the lout in the expensive car behind her suddenly honks, leaving Rebecca besmirched with a black streak from eyebrow to hairline. When she finally gets to work, she finds that her desk has been cleared for a newcomer and she’s been banished to an undesirable corner. Surprise: the newcomer is the lout in the expensive car, who’s actually quite attractive and becomingly modest. It’s not even his own car. Max Stoddart, the new science and environmental correspondent, is bright, too. Rebecca is impressed but wary. After all, she has other things to worry about. Her Jewish grandmother, agitating for great-grandchildren, has been advertising on Rebecca’s behalf on dateadoctor.com. And Rebecca’s father has selected a former classmate of hers, the infinitely tawdry Bernadette O’Brien, to have a midlife affair—and crisis—with. Good news: svelte as a teenager, when she was dubbed “Lipstick” for the lurid red goo on her pouty mouth, Bernadette now has thunder thighs and looks older than Rebecca. Bad news: circumstances will force the two into a shared flat until Rebecca’s father gets his act together. Even a night of erotic bliss with Max Stoddart wouldn’t make up for this. And is that grandma-enlisted geek, Warren, leaving messages? Max is curious, Rebecca furious. Other medical professionals are soon sending e-mails: an ambulance driver, a cranial osteopath, two male midwives, a prosthetic limb technician . . . . And things go from bad to worse when an undercover assignment from the paper’s gung-ho editor lands Rebecca and Max in the Middle East, pursued by a host of nefarious ne’er-do-wells.
Quick in pace and often very funny.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-33656-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Delta
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2002
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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 Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960
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
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