A novel about family, personal development, and whether true love can overcome deep-rooted emotional damage.
Kara Malendar is a notoriously tough food critic at the Los Angeles Times who’s proud of her reputation. Her job requires a hard outer shell, and after growing up under public scrutiny as the daughter of a U.S. senator, she’s made sure to build a shell that’s triple-reinforced. But when Kara is assigned a feature on Logan Rye, the owner of popular new restaurant The Yard, she’s terrified that the vulnerable person she’s been hiding beneath all that armor will be exposed. Logan is an earthy, passionate, and benevolent chef who believes in humanely produced food and sustainability. He grew up on his father’s farm, where he now sources much of his restaurant’s produce and meat, and he prides himself on taking care of his family after his mother left them. When Kara shows up at his front door to interview him, he’s worried that the life he worked so diligently to create for himself will crumble. It turns out that they first met in Paris while studying at Le Cordon Bleu for a semester—but there, Logan knew her as “Winnie Parker,” the identity she briefly adopted so she could pretend that she wasn’t living in the fishbowl of high society. Unbeknownst to each other, they were the loves of each other’s lives, and their attraction hasn’t waned. As they reignite their romance, both characters reckon with the family trauma that first drove them apart—and whether or not they can deal with ingrained fears of abandonment and rejection. Ewens (Candidate, 2015, etc.) delivers a story that’s equally sensual and smart. The author volleys deftly between Kara’s and Logan’s perspectives, in both the past and the present, with beautiful pacing, revealing plenty of secrets and cliffhangers along the way. The story is full of richly conceived characters and offers brief glimmers of insight into differences between the sexes. It also depicts a foodie world that’s as authentic and intriguing as the people in it.
A charming, engrossing story of love lost and eventually found.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9908571-5-0
Page Count: 318
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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The years pass by at a fast and steamy clip in Blume’s latest adult novel (Wifey, not reviewed; Smart Women, 1984) as two friends find loyalties and affections tested as they grow into young women. In sixth grade, when Victoria Weaver is asked by new girl Caitlin Somers to spend the summer with her on Martha’s Vineyard, her life changes forever. Victoria, or more commonly Vix, lives in a small house; her brother has muscular dystrophy; her mother is unhappy, and money is scarce. Caitlin, on the other hand, lives part of the year with her wealthy mother Phoebe, who’s just moved to Albuquerque, and summers with her father Lamb, equally affluent, on the Vineyard. The story of how this casual invitation turns the two girls into what they call "Summer sisters" is prefaced with a prologue in which Vix is asked by Caitlin to be her matron of honor. The years in between are related in brief segments by numerous characters, but mostly by Vix. Caitlin, determined never to be ordinary, is always testing the limits, and in adolescence falls hard for Von, an older construction worker, while Vix falls for his friend Bru. Blume knows the way kids and teens speak, but her two female leads are less credible as they reach adulthood. After high school, Caitlin travels the world and can’t understand why Vix, by now at Harvard on a scholarship and determined to have a better life than her mother has had, won’t drop out and join her. Though the wedding briefly revives Vix’s old feelings for Bru, whom Caitlin is marrying, Vix is soon in love with Gus, another old summer friend, and a more compatible match. But Caitlin, whose own demons have been hinted at, will not be so lucky. The dark and light sides of friendship breathlessly explored in a novel best saved for summer beachside reading.
Pub Date: May 8, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-32405-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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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. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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