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
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
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
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