by Varsha Dixit ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 2014
A modest international romance, likely to please fans of the genre.
In Dixit’s (Wrong Means Right End, 2012, etc.) romance, a young Indian woman must make her way personally and professionally in America.
Eila Sood isn’t sure what to expect when she arrives in New York from Delhi: after all, she’s never visited the country, and she hasn’t seen her sister Sheela in seven years. Sent as an envoy from her aging parents, she hopes to repair ties with her sibling, who was cast out from the family for wedding an American man. But despite marrying for love, Sheela’s relationship with her husband is rocky, and Eila finds her sister trying to re-create a slice of India in suburban New Jersey. But Eila has her own problems: just as she’s beginning to adjust to her new job in Manhattan, her hours get cut in half; she winds up doing the books for a strip club and then working as an assistant for Brett Wright, the owner of a local upscale restaurant. Brett is intense, maddening, often rude, but always sexy, and from the moment Eila gets off the plane at JFK, she keeps running into him where she least expects it. Although she initially wants nothing to do with him, she inevitably gets pulled into his world—and she may finally have to face the fact that she isn’t putting up much of a fight. But how can she be the second child to go against everything her parents believe? This fourth novel from Dixit treads familiar narrative ground from an uncommonly explored cultural perspective. The exploration of Eila and Sheela’s relationship, and Sheela’s conflicting feelings about her marriage, are the strongest parts of the novel. Eila and Brett’s relationship, however, may be enjoyed by romance fans, but will be less persuasive for general readers. Anyone who’s read Twilight or Fifty Shades of Grey will be familiar with the story of a clumsy, insecure protagonist falling for a brooding, unattainable man, but the transition from Eila and Brett acting rudely to each other to realizing they’re in love is so quick that it feels jarring. He comes across as nothing more than a fantasy—and one that never comes down to earth.
A modest international romance, likely to please fans of the genre.Pub Date: June 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9903884-0-1
Page Count: 260
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
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. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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