An entertaining and thoughtful account of loss and artistic ambition.
A young, troubled celebrity turns to a friend for salvation.
Pop star Ananda Dawn crashes her rental car into the Eiffel Tower. She is immediately swarmed by paparazzi, and suspected of driving while under the influence of drugs. She charms her way out of a difficult bind, but immediately flies back to the United States to seek out the companionship of her estranged friend, Margaret “Mag” Woods. Years earlier, Ananda’s biography, written by her manager, painted a bacchanalia-inspired picture of Mag’s friendship with the singer, which included unrestrained promiscuity and rampant drug use. The scandal that ensued nearly ended Mag’s career as a therapist. Ananda, who wants to mend fences and revive the friendship, furtively drugs Mag’s tea, calls her boss and quits on her behalf, and convinces her to become the star’s manager. Mag accepts the position on the condition that Ananda seek professional help for her drug addiction. Looming in the background is the fact that Mag has just written an unflattering book about Ananda, soon to be published by a major press outlet. Meanwhile, Mag feels torn between becoming a fully responsible adult and indulging a wilder side that not only craves spontaneity, but also artistic fulfillment: “My creative brain burst to life while my rational brain loosened its vise-like grip. I’d spent years sharpening it, and then it became the least important thing in the world.” Debut author Taylor writes with a punchy flair, and manages to conjure a protagonist both infuriating and beguiling simultaneously. Mag turns out to be a fascinatingly complex character as well. Her creative ambition—and a sorrowful loss experienced at the height of the women’s friendship—constitutes the powerful bond between the two, who turn out to have a deeper kinship than one initially suspects. The plot, problematically, is sometimes a bit contrived, and will likely elicit the reader’s incredulity. For example, Mag is weirdly unperturbed by the fact that she was drugged, and inexplicably ready to ditch her career at a moment’s notice. She also seems aggrieved by her loss of professional credibility, but the book she writes to vindicate herself seems destined to only exacerbate the problem. The intelligently crafted characters—and the nuanced relationships between them—compensate for these failings.
An entertaining and thoughtful account of loss and artistic ambition.Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5188-2759-4
Page Count: 403
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
