Well-intentioned and readable, but very broadly drawn and often gratingly rah-rah.
A feisty middle-aged black woman sheds 70 pounds and rekindles the flame with her preacher husband.
Approaching her 25th college reunion, 220-pound Ada Howard decides to get out of her 3X sweats and work towards that stretchy size-10 black dress at Target. It’s not just that she wants to look good at the reunion for foxy old flame Matt Manson, who appends a handwritten message (“Honey Babe. It’s been too long.”) to the invitation. And it’s not just that her preacher husband, Lucius, might very well be cheating on her. (He’s lost weight, bought a new car and is never home.) Getting slim and healthy is a political issue for Ada. Her three older sisters died of diabetes before they turned 60, and every day at KidPlay, the day care center she runs in Nashville, she sees a parade of oversized African-American women feeding their children the same fattening junk food they eat themselves. So Ada embarks on a program of exercise and diet based on the list of 53 rules that opens this self-help manual delivered in a fictional format. For the most part, the rules are nothing you couldn’t find in an actual diet book—though probably not “Get better hair down there,” which forecasts the earthy humor with which Randall (Rebel Yell, 2009, etc.) in subsequent pages chronicles Ada’s journey toward size 10 and a revitalized marriage. When Ada visits the four congregants she suspects of being her husband’s bit on the side, instead of confessions, she hears a litany of the sexual tributes to his wife that Preach recited when invited to adultery. His highly improbable confidences are typical of the novel’s relentlessly positive tone; Randall’s emphasis on black pride and self-respect, while understandable, makes for predictable fiction. A quick aside about a betrayal by Ada’s best friend Delila strikes the only note of adult complexity in a book dedicated to simple cheerleading.
Well-intentioned and readable, but very broadly drawn and often gratingly rah-rah.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60819-827-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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
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
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