Facile, silly and insulting to both sexes. Will probably be a big hit.
Two Manhattan women decide the urban men in their lives need retooling in order to be worthwhile spouses—or at least first dates: a chick-lit debut by the founding editor of Zoetrope.
Lucy is a Columbia biology professor with a wimpy boyfriend, Adam. Still in the throws of his econ dissertation and practically living off Lucy, Adam also proves himself pathetically inept on a Valentine’s Day camping trip. Lucy’s best friend, Martha, is a struggling actress. Out of frustration with her own first dates, Martha has just begun a business called FirstDate, through which she offers her critiquing service to improve men’s dating skills. The women, who live in the same building, spend a lot of time together in a bar dishing men, in particular New York City men in all their (white, middle-class) varieties: metro-sexual preeners, overly sensitive neurotics, techno-gadget addicts, self-important tycoons. In contrast, Lucy’s best college buddy, Cooper, a dairy farmer from West Virginia, is both manly and a gentleman. Why Lucy and he never got romantic remains vague, but when he visits New York, she watches with some jealousy as sparks fly between him and Martha. Nevertheless, the three of them hatch a plan to start a camp to train men how to be men. Next thing you know, Martha’s rounded up some of her clients and her sweetly neurotic brother—while Lucy’s tricked Adam into thinking he’s attending as a counselor—and they’re all off to West Virginny, where the men are soon having a great time changing tires and shooting guns. Martha is having less fun because Cooper’s mother is a steel magnolia doing her damnedest to thwart Martha’s romance with her son, while Cooper himself is distracted. Cooper’s secret soon comes out—and, suddenly, urban skills start coming in handy. Even poor Adam gets to shine.
Facile, silly and insulting to both sexes. Will probably be a big hit.Pub Date: July 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-6214-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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