A haunting story of betrayal within a beautiful portrait of youth.
A trip to France leads two friends to ruin in Dunlop’s lush debut.
After her affair with her married professor ends with his resignation, Brooke escapes the ensuing scandal by signing up for a study-abroad program in Nantes, France. Her introduction to the French language is delicious—“The phones in America ring and the phones here in France drin; the dogs there say ‘woof,’ the dogs here say ‘abois’ ”—but she’s largely consumed by a complicated relationship with her classmate Sophie. Rich and beautiful Sophie might seem less superficial if others could see past her looks, but Sophie's vague sadness doesn’t elicit much sympathy from her less fortunate friend. Brooke compares herself to Sophie constantly, and their friendship is put to the real test when the two girls meet a young photographer named Alex who charms Brooke by saying he’s bored with models. “Sexy isn’t a question of looks,” Alex tells her. “It’s a question of mastery of oneself, mastery of one’s instruments,” and his appeal from that point forward is undeniable. After the two women spend a few sun-kissed days and wine-soaked nights at Alex’s familial home in stunning Cap Ferrat, Brooke may be in love with him—and Alex may be in love with them both. Sexual tension, beautiful scenery, long talks about art, and fantasies about staying in France forever brighten the moody atmosphere and sustain the friendship for a while. But if Brooke takes her crush a little too seriously, Sophie doesn’t take it seriously enough, and a rift grows between the two friends that will have life-altering consequences for them both. Whether the surprise ending is real or imagined, it fades away like the afterglow of a perfect summer night.
A haunting story of betrayal within a beautiful portrait of youth.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0942-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Washington Square/Pocket
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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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
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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BOOK REVIEW
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