A readable, highly charged amalgam of erotic action and suspense headlined by a likable, compassionate exotic performer with...
Dual-authored debut fiction about a young but seasoned stripper navigating the Las Vegas strip club circuit.
Strong, sexy African-American stripper Melissa Masters, 23, works the Stilettos strip club patrons like a pro, but the dancing lifestyle is anything but glitzy. Now in her fourth year at the club, Masters (her stage name is “Sapphire”) recalls the day, having just turned 21, she left Buffalo, N.Y., for the “fantasy and lights of Las Vegas.” Those days of innocence long gone, she now must contend with exhaustive hours spent lap-dancing rich, pushy, strange men while fending off the sexual advances of Stilettos’ sleazy, arrogant general manager, Scott. Her personal life is also messy thanks to Spider, a smooth operator on the Vegas scene; she falls for Spider, and he fathers their daughter, Christina. The authors amp up the melodrama after Christina is removed from Sapphire’s care, Sapphire doesn’t excommunicate Spider altogether, until she discovers that he’s already married with two teenage children. A hasty marriage to a wealthy, aging retiree named Tony temporarily satiates Sapphire, but soon, she longs for Spider’s bad-boy tough love and a chance to rat out Stilettos’ shady management to the FBI. Complementing the fast-moving storyline are pages of fascinating insider industry secrets, such as a dancer’s sartorial requirements, the prevalence of police trouble and dirty details of the strip club circuit, all culled from co-author Diamond’s seven years as a Vegas stripper. Toward the book’s conclusion, Diamond’s intentions to educate, not patronize, the women working within the lucrative strip club world and challenge the preconceived notions associated with it are discreetly communicated through Sapphire. Diamond and McGann compile a rousing, spicy brew of sex, love and intrigue with a cliffhanger ending foretelling more Sapphire adventures to come.
A readable, highly charged amalgam of erotic action and suspense headlined by a likable, compassionate exotic performer with a heart of gold.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-1493105472
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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