Witty but slight.
In this Christmas-themed novel from Valdes-Rodriquez (The Husband Habit, 2009, etc.), a newly single interior designer tests the tenets of The Rules on three potential mates.
Christy de la Cruz was shocked when her perfect husband, Zach, announced he was gay. Now divorced, Christy juggles her busy schedule as designer to Albuquerque’s rich and famous with the demands of her large, socio-economically disadvantaged but warm and outspoken Mexican-American clan. At a family pig roast in the barrio neighborhood where she grew up, Christy is challenged by her cousin Maggie to put Zach behind her—in addition to being gay, he’s an Anglo and an outsider. Maggie bets Christy that three dates each with three handsome homeboys who have made good will heal her broken heart. The caballeros in question, named after the Three Kings, are Balthazar, who bullied the once chubby Christy in grade school, Caspar, a wealthy music agent, and Melchior, a nationally known authority on chimpanzee behavior. To placate Maggie, and to alleviate her own guilt for not helping her relatives out financially, Christy takes the wager. Melchior is too wrapped up in his primates to appeal to her. She’s still resentful of Balthazar’s earlier bullying, and as a lowly high-school teacher, he’s not exactly prosperous. The most likely prospect is Caspar, who is in Christy’s income bracket and has the Beemer to prove it. She’s also powerfully attracted to him. Will she be able to resist his allure enough to feign indifference and to keep their three dates platonic, as dictated by The Rules? Will she come to realize that loyalty to her family sometimes demands generosity of more than spirit? Is there more to Balthazar than her suppositions about him, and less to Casper? The answers are predictable and clichéd. The chief pleasures, besides descriptions of outfits, food and local color, lie in the banter between Christy and the other characters—and in the contrast between her Rules-dictated demureness and her unvoiced opinions.
Witty but slight.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-60533-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
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
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
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