But like the soap operas it lampoons, the book offers readers an escape from reality, at least for a short time—and anyone...
Rowell’s sequel (Secrets of a Soap Opera Diva, 2010) about a soap-opera diva and her cast mates parodies the real deal with cookie-cutter characters, bad subplots and cheesy dialogue.
Calysta Jeffries, star of World Broadcast Company’s The Rich and the Ruthless, is back on the set after a stint in rehab, but it appears she’s more popular with the viewing audience than with some members of the cast and crew. Racist co-executive producer Stanley Mercury and Edith Norman, president of daytime television, really have it in for her. They engage in a plot to add a little spice to the show and make the actress’ life uncomfortable by hiring Calysta’s 18-year-old daughter, Ivy, to portray her long-lost daughter on the soap. Calysta doesn’t self-destruct, but mother and daughter knock heads on a regular basis, and Ivy becomes a diva both on and off the set. Plenty more is happening with the countless other characters who are part of Calysta’s life, and they pop in and out of the story so many times it’s hard to keep them all straight: An associate producer who’s married to one of the soap’s stars becomes involved in art forgery; Max Gardner arrives on the set, and sparks fly between Calysta and her new assistant director; Calysta’s grandmother, a stable influence in her life, falls ill; Shannen Lassiter, yet another soap star, becomes upset with a storyline that has Ivy stealing her Latin boyfriend, Javier, who’s also her boyfriend in real life. A veteran of the soap scene, Rowell swoops back and forth between snippets of scripts, first-person observations and third-person narration with such dizzying abandon, it’s hard not to suffer whiplash.
But like the soap operas it lampoons, the book offers readers an escape from reality, at least for a short time—and anyone prepared to overlook the author’s quirky style may enjoy it for that alone.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4383-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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