Heavy with sexual passages and light on difficulties, readers who have enjoyed Talia in prior books will find comfort in her...
From author Devour (Unrequited, 2013) comes Book 3 in a series about the rich, confidant, sexy Talia Jacobs.
Talia has finally found her soul mate. Bodhi is a man who appeals to Talia on every level. Talia tells him, “I love you so fucking much it scares the shit out of me.” Having met early on in life when both were living in Haiti, their reunion as adults stirs emotional bliss and sexual passion, which is explicitly described: “The length of his hand extended as he used his fingers to caress my swollen passion through saturated panties from behind.” All is well, until Bodhi has his misgivings. After a trip with Talia to Australia, passions suddenly cool. Blaming the trip for lost business ventures, Bodhi brings the relationship to a standstill, an event echoed by the outside world; Talia notices “a flock of ravens coming towards the window…. I knew something wasn’t right.” Traveling to China to deal with the breakup, Talia learns martial arts from monks and consults with a magical figure known as Grandma Li. Will the two reunite, or must Talia again wander the globe in search of lasting love? The answer comes rather quickly, causing the second half of the book to be full of erotic passages (“I could feel warmth generating from his hands being so close to my honey hole”), though it’s short on conflict. Talia fills her days with tantric lovemaking and naughty activities at the movie theater, but dramatic tension is largely absent. The final chapters serve as a victory lap for the woman who cannot fail. Still adventurous in the bedroom, Talia finds plenty of ways to achieve orgasm as the series comes to a close.
Heavy with sexual passages and light on difficulties, readers who have enjoyed Talia in prior books will find comfort in her newfound complacency.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-0992299941
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Publicious Self-Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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