A little too reassuring (nothing truly bad happens), but Coll can be hysterically funny about parental idiocy.
Having gently skewered the college-application process (Acceptance, 2007), Coll trains her sights on another equally ridiculous tradition among certain upper-middle-class high-school graduates—the weeklong party at the beach.
As Jordan approaches her high school graduation in suburban Washington D.C., her friends start planning to rent a house at the Delaware shore for a week. Jordan, whose family moved East from Omaha her junior year, does not feel completely at home with her new friends and is secretly ambivalent about spending the week partying with them. Her parents, former teacher Leah and urban planner Charles, have been extremely protective of Jordan since her head injury playing soccer the year before and are critical of lenient parenting. Nevertheless, Leah agrees to host a meeting about the proposed rental for the clueless parents of Jordan’s friends, partly to prove she’s an involved parent, partly to experience Jordan’s fun vicariously. Already financially strapped, Charles is less enthusiastic. The beach week becomes one more tension point in an already shaky marriage. Soon all the parents have organized. They write up a pledge of good behavior for their daughters to sign and rent the girls a house assured that it belongs to a respected local author. Actually, the decrepit wreck—the realtor’s photos are of the house next door—belongs to the author’s ex-husband, whose mental health is questionable. Meanwhile the girls are also busy organizing—who is going to bring which illegal substance. When Jordan announces she wants to spend the week traveling with her new boyfriend, a college student from Tunisia, instead of with her friends, Leah and Charles push “beach week” as a safer alternative. Then they notice one of Jordan’s friends in a porn movie and change their minds again. But asked to chaperone, Charles jumps at the chance to do some partying of his own. Mayhem follows.
A little too reassuring (nothing truly bad happens), but Coll can be hysterically funny about parental idiocy.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-10925-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Shenanigan
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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