Fans of E.L. James will likely find this novel worth a look.
In Anthony’s debut, a dashing, dominant businessman sweeps a lonely girl off her feet, and they quickly fall into a submissive/dominant relationship.
This first installment of a planned trilogy chronicles the love affair between the razor-tongued Eva Chase and the super suave, slightly mysterious Mr. Alexander Mason and has many parallels to the smash-hit Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy; indeed, that series’ fans may have difficulty putting it down. Eva is an ambitious, driven businesswoman who has worked her way up to the top at Prime House Investments and plans to stay there. However, the sweet-smelling, muscular Alexander throws a wrench in those plans. From the moment of their first meeting, when Eva literally tumbles into his arms during a drunken bar dance on her birthday, she is powerless against him. She soon finds herself divulging to Alexander her deepest secrets and desires. The two embark upon a stormy, push-and-pull relationship, each struggling for power. All the while, Eva tries to keep her life together personally and professionally; luckily, the brazen brunette has her two best friends, Sam and Chrissy, to help. While the overall dom/sub theme is clear, it becomes a bit unclear as to who exactly is dominant and who is submissive as the novel progresses; will Anthony put Eva in charge, as she is in every other aspect of her life? The answer is still vague at the novel’s conclusion, which may frustrate some readers. Although Eva may strike readers as a bit grating at times—who is really that perfect or that driven?—her cat-and-mouse relationship with Alexander is consistently believable. That said, readers may want to know more about the relatively one-dimensional Alexander—more descriptions of him, more dialogue from him, and perhaps a peek into his storied and steamy past.
Fans of E.L. James will likely find this novel worth a look.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1479383115
Page Count: 284
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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