A wonderful, quick-witted alternative to the typical romance novel.
The Devil Wears Prada meets My Hollywood in this witty Hollywood romance.
Newly divorced, 40-something Natalie Saladay leaves her steady, safe existence in San Francisco and returns to Los Angeles after nearly 20 years, in search of opportunity and a little excitement. Although L.A. is ripe with possibility, it’s also full of ghosts from Natalie’s past—most notably Benny Gallo, a charismatic movie producer and Natalie’s former lover. She hopes to avoid him like the plague, but that becomes extremely difficult as Natalie has taken up her former job as a studio reader, wading through scripts and books in search of that perfect movie, at the very studio where Benny runs a division. Natalie also butts heads with Mona Pearl, her much younger, beautiful, extremely career-driven boss, who is in search of the next multimillion-dollar blockbuster and not the character-driven scripts that Natalie supports. Conflicted about her feelings for Benny—is he the one that got away or the one that she should continue to run away from?—and his motivation for going after her, Natalie can’t put off Benny’s magnetism for long and reignites a relationship with him. She soon convinces Benny to produce American Vintage, a smart, character-focused picture that Mona passes over in order to make a big budget, action-packed movie. As each movie is rushed along in order to be screened for audiences, Mona and Natalie’s rivalry intensifies to the point that it strains Natalie’s relationship with Benny, leading her to question whether or not she is risking too much for the sake of American Vintage and proving Mona wrong. Despite a few instances of heavy-handed prose and some narrative threads that tie together too tidily, Culler has crafted a smart novel that offers an unexpected look into the world of movie story readers and the Hollywood film industry in general. The characters are sharp, playful and entertaining without falling into typical Hollywood caricature; the plot contains just the right amount and variety of conflicts to keep the reader invested; and the overall story moves forward at a nice clip through a series of deceptively short chapters that leave the reader craving just one more bite.
A wonderful, quick-witted alternative to the typical romance novel.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456425388
Page Count: 353
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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