Valdes-Rodriguez lays on the irony with a trowel and makes the same points repeatedly: people with Spanish surnames come...
God has nothing on Valdes-Rodriguez—she created her first novel in a mere six days!
Touted as the Hispanic counterpart to Terry McMillan by handlers eager to cash in on demographics! Proud possessor of a legendary temper and deeply resentful of ethnic stereotypes that nonetheless made her a fortune! (The Dirty Girls Social Club, 2003, made the New York Times bestseller list and was optioned by Jennifer Lopez’s production company!) Now comes Valdes-Rodriguez’s second, set in Los Angeles, where Dallas-born Alexis manages a popular Mexican band called Los Chimpances del Norte and dreams of bigger things. Marcella, half-Dominican, half-French, and raised in Santa Barbara, is a gorgeous actress tired of playing whores and maids and still hoping for her big break. Olivia Flores, survivor of a childhood Salvadoran death-squad attack, lives in the racially mixed neighborhood of Echo Park and wonders whether she’s raising her young son right. Her philandering husband seems to have lost interest, perhaps thanks to Olivia’s dowdy appearance and Frida Kahlo–esque intensity. Burning question: Will Hollywood ever buy Olivia’s dramatic screenplay about El Salvador? Hell, no. Alexis has no luck convincing the powerful pinheads who rule movieland, but Marcella scratches up the cash to get the script produced via a financial connection with her creepy, child-porn-loving uncle—and chica, everything changes in a few implausible seconds. Looks like the threesome has the world on a string at last—but tragedy awaits! Alexis’s true love, Goyo, a Cuban-born music star, is shot! The culprit: a disgruntled journalist dumped by Alexis earlier in the story. Despite his whitey-white name and skin, Daniel Mehegan is a ridiculous wannabe who affects gangsta-pimp-hip-hop-star ways and walks while he cooks up a bogus tale of drug smuggling that implicates Alexis. Happy ending, though.
Valdes-Rodriguez lays on the irony with a trowel and makes the same points repeatedly: people with Spanish surnames come from different places (and they hate to be called Hispanic), American racism is endemic, and clueless white people never get the slang right.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-33234-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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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