Agreeable, predictable and forgettable.
Half-sisters reconnect with each other, and with Mr. Rights from their pasts, during the summer of 2008.
Their Aunt Lydia, sister to the father who left Peck’s mother for Cassie’s, has bequeathed her rickety shack in Southampton to the two young women. “The situation,” Peck declares with her usual drama, “is that you and I can’t agree on anything.” Cassie wants to sell Fool’s House and head back to Switzerland, where she works desultorily as a journalist. Peck, a would-be actress living in New York, wants to hang onto the house as an accoutrement to the ultra-fabulous lifestyle she aspires to. She also wants to accept an invitation from Miles Noble, who broke her heart seven years ago, the summer she obsessively read and reread The Great Gatsby and pressed it on 21-year-old Cassie, who’d never read it. Surely it means something that the now fabulously wealthy Miles is throwing “a GATSBY party” and has invited them? Cassie, more sober than her flamboyant semi-sibling, doubts it but agrees to go in hopes of finding architect Finn Killian, who might know the combination to Aunt Lydia’s locked safe. The guy she remembers as a distant older man turns out to be a sexy charmer, though Cassie is convinced against all evidence that he’s “just being polite” as he pursues her throughout the summer. Peck, meanwhile, is dismayed by the vulgarity of Miles’ ostentatious mansion, but comes to appreciate his sterling qualities as the season winds down with hints of the economic meltdown to come. There’s absolutely no suspense about narrator Cassie ending up with perfect Finn, though she’s amazingly obtuse about his interest, and Peck is made up of attitudes and tics rather than actual personality traits. Still, Ganek (Lula Meets God and Doubts Him, 2007) provides enough zippy one-liners, moderately vivid party scenes and adequately attractive descriptions of clothes to sustain a paper-thin plot involving a missing painting and an unwanted houseguest.
Agreeable, predictable and forgettable.Pub Date: May 31, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-670-02178-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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