“Pants” fans who have grown up with the girls and love them will no doubt overlook the improbabilities, unrealized...
Having turned to adult fiction (My Name is Memory, 2010, etc.), Brashares offers what may or may not be a closing novel to her popular Traveling Pants series.
Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood (2007) ended almost a decade ago as Lena, Carmen, Bridget and Tibby completed their freshman year of college. Now approaching 30, the four friends have hit troubled waters, individually and as a group. In fact, they are barely in touch with each other. In San Francisco, Bridget avoids committing to sensitive immigration lawyer Eric (whose patience is the book’s great mystery). Lena lives alone in self-proclaimed poverty and isolation in Providence, where she also teaches at RISD, but her heart still belongs to her lost Greek love Kostos. With a weekly gig on a TV police drama, Carmen’s acting career has taken off and she is engaged to an ABC executive nobody else likes. The three have not heard much from Tibby since she moved to Australia with her boyfriend Brian several years ago. Then out of the blue, Tibby sends tickets for a reunion on the Greek island of Santorini, where they have already shared so much. Lena, Carmen and Bridget are thrilled as they gather. But tragedy strikes: Tibby drowns before she sees them, and the women suspect suicide. Devastated, they return to their separate lives and stop communicating. But Tibby has left each a mysterious package with a letter asking for another gathering on April 2. Her force of will influence her friends to make the right decisions to find happiness. Carmen must find a way to be true to herself. Bridget must find purpose in her life and get over her fear of commitment. Lena must find a way not to fear love. The ending leaves just enough romantic wiggle room for one more installment.
“Pants” fans who have grown up with the girls and love them will no doubt overlook the improbabilities, unrealized characters and plot manipulations to make this a bestseller.Pub Date: June 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-385-52122-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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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