Leblanc’s debut novel is the first of a trilogy revolving around a beautiful woman from Siberia trying to make her way in New York City.
Although she has a rich, albeit unattractive husband and a job as a server at the most renowned restaurant in the Siberian capital of Krasnoyarsk, Olga Kotova longs for more. When she waits on the striking, wealthy Svetlana, who tells her about the United States, Olga knows precisely what she wants—“a life of wealth in America.” After traversing a complex, expensive maze of bureaucratic red tape, Olga finally attains her U.S. visa and arrives in New York City. During her monthlong visit, she meets wealthy investment banker Robert Thompson at a glamorous party. Robert, although reeling from his ex-fiancee’s unfaithfulness, is taken with all the beautiful foreign women at the party, including Olga. The two don’t meet again, however, until Olga’s second trip to America. This time, her luck changes for the worse: Her cash is stolen; she must find work, and she doesn’t have a work visa. The only jobs available to a Russian woman with no papers are in the sex trade—a strip club, a “happy ending” spa and/or prostitution. Olga finally sees a way out with Robert. He pays for her to attend design school and seems to genuinely care about her. But when the financial crisis puts Robert’s firm in bankruptcy, things start to fall apart for both of them. Leblanc’s pace is lively, and he nimbly keeps his characters and plotlines clear. The dialogue, however, can be stiff. For example, after Olga has a passionate encounter with a lover, he tells her it was amazing. She replies, “Yes, it was. I like you.” Readers may find Leblanc’s depiction of the investment banking world distasteful. The fabulous soirees are often little more than glammed-up, orgiastic frat parties. Money is king in this universe; art, literature, creativity and culture are largely absent. Perhaps highlighting the excesses of Wall Street is Leblanc’s point, but that message may be lost in this world of privilege.
A somewhat bleak look into a realm of rich men and the women who love them.
Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0692234396
Page Count: 236
Publisher: RW Publishers
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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