Like so many startups, glossy, fun, and ambitious if not particularly deep.
A new college grad figures out life, love, and the tech world in Yen’s breezy debut.
The outspoken daughter of traditional Taiwanese parents in the Bay Area, Sophia Young returns home newly graduated from college with a very clear life plan: a few years working at a shiny investment bank until she meets “The One,” and then “the white picket fence, two kids (preferably twins), and the Mrs. Homemaker lifestyle” that’s been her dream since childhood. So when speaking out of turn gets her fired at the bank, she’s momentarily distraught—until her best friend helps her get a paralegal gig working on initial public offerings and Sophia is initiated into the startup world, where her no-nonsense pluck makes her a star. Soon, Sophia is managing investor relations and doubling as the right-hand man for a Steve Jobs–like tech founder, and her white picket fence visions give way to new dreams. But finding a partner who can support her ambitions isn’t necessarily easy, Sophia discovers, and amid her success, she’s started neglecting her health. But the biggest test is yet to come: When Andre Stark, a flashy tech founder, convinces her to come run investor relations for him—leaving her beloved old team behind—she finds herself miserable in his Ivy League boys’ club and is forced to make her biggest decision yet. A lone mismatched boyfriend aside, Sophia's world is populated with benevolent and powerful mentors who consistently recognize her hard work (if nothing else, the novel offers a road map for good management), doting parents, a ride-or-die best friend, and few personal flaws of substance, giving the novel a certain fairy-tale quality. While the plot takes the occasional off-kilter jag, this is a much-needed professional coming-of-age story; one only wishes it were a slightly more insightful one.
Like so many startups, glossy, fun, and ambitious if not particularly deep.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-267301-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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
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
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