An amusing, ultimately heartwarming romp through the ridiculousness of tabloid gossip and hometown comforts.
This whirlwind comedy/drama, Dineen’s debut, centers on Lila Montgomery and her high school crush, a hilarious cat fight with a Hollywood starlet and her award-winning romance novel nobody knows about.
Thirty-two-year-old Lila is single and bored, working as a personal assistant to a sex-crazed, crooked Hollywood agent. Fed up with her job and unfulfilled in her lonely, childless life, she spends her free time writing explicit romance fantasy stories under the pseudonym Jasmine Sheath. When an invitation to her 15-year high school reunion comes in the mail, she decides to leave California for three weeks and spend some time figuring her life out in the comfort of her Illinois hometown. Drama ensues when famous actress Melinda Forrester—recently nominated for an Oscar for her depiction of a drug-addicted hooker and college student who becomes an Olympic track star—sues Lila for spreading rumors about her promiscuity. To complicate matters further, Jasmine Sheath’s publisher is requiring her to do a book signing in her hometown, revealing her true identity to the world. On top of that, Melinda’s lawyer in the lawsuit is none other than Lila’s high school crush. Dineen’s novel is packed with campy twists that thicken the plot while propelling it into absurdity. Dineen splices Lila’s story with the fantasy she wrote as Jasmine Sheath, which, despite its being a comical allegory for the “real world” drama, can get confusing. However, if understood as a satire of romance novels and Hollywood drama, the ridiculousness becomes fairly intriguing as this fun, quick read examines the envies and dissatisfactions in women’s lives, reassuring readers that no one’s life is truly perfect.
An amusing, ultimately heartwarming romp through the ridiculousness of tabloid gossip and hometown comforts.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1496150455
Page Count: 292
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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