Although the life-affirming message is hardly subtle, Ephron delivers it with finesse.
Three women embark on a journey of self-discovery, facilitated by a giant feline, in Ephron’s whimsical but winsome third novel.
Twenty-somethings Tracee and Lana, best friends since childhood, have left Baltimore on the run from an unnamed crisis, but Tracee’s escape attire—a designer wedding dress—provides a clue to the zaniness to follow. Lana, a recovering alcoholic who dropped out of college, is fixing a flat when drab, middle-aged Rita, who’s been walking the highway for several hours, offers a hand. Rita accepts a ride in Lana’s Mustang, destination unknown. Outside the rural village of Fairville, N.C., Tracee falls asleep at the wheel and totals the car. Seeking shelter, the women happen upon a ramshackle roadhouse called The Lion. Breaking in, they are shocked to discover an actual lion caged in a corner. The Lion’s slovenly owner, Clayton, hires all three women as waitresses, although he at first consigns Rita to menial chores for insufficient hotness. Tim, a gangly but kind young man who works at the local dollar store as well as for Clayton, finds lodging for the women, who are stuck in Fairville until they can earn enough to fix the Mustang. Since the furniture industry outsourced all the jobs, everyone in Fairville is scrabbling for a living, and business is slow at the Lion. This changes when Rita and the lion, whose name is Marcel, form a special bond. Soon, she’s taking Marcel for early-morning walks and performing lion-taming stunts in the bar at night. The characters undergo transformations as The Lion draws crowds. Clayton spruces up and tries to court Rita, who’s newly confident and adventurous after decades in the stifling marriage she fled. Lana, whose confession in a town AA meeting is used against her by the local police, begins to rebuild the bridges she’s burned, and Tracee, a kleptomaniac, finds a refuge from past bad boyfriend woes.
Although the life-affirming message is hardly subtle, Ephron delivers it with finesse.Pub Date: March 29, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-15848-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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
© 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.
