Clever, original, and unabashedly silly fun.
A disturbingly ambitious woman finds herself challenged by mysterious crises—both personal and professional—in Cohen’s painfully funny satire of the tech industry.
In Shelley Stone, Cohen has created an aggressively unlikable yet captivating and entertaining heroine. Twenty years ago, as a directionless 20-year-old, Shelley was struck by lightning, a trauma for which she claims to be grateful despite the physical pain it inflicted. She doesn’t care that the lightning shriveled her pleasure receptor or that she now scores low on the likability scale. What matters is that the lightning strike changed her brain in ways that made her into the driven woman she’s become. Shelley is married and has two children—readers will concur with her amazement at having attracted financial-analyst husband Rafe, who goes along with her scheduled 12 minutes of daily sex even though his own pleasure principle remains intact—but she's primarily committed to her role as CEO of Conch, a company producing personal data repositories shaped like shells and worn behind users’ ears. On a family vacation in France, Shelley’s 4-year-old daughter, Nova, disappears while Shelley and Rafe are distracted by work calls; more disturbing, both parents continue their calls while searching for her. Fortunately, a stranger finds Nova, a stranger who somehow has Shelley’s cellphone number and seems oddly excited to meet her when returning the child. Within weeks, Shelley meets another stranger: Michelle looks like a younger version of Shelley herself, down to the same scar on her arm, and has experienced the same childhood. Is a pre-lightning strike, alternate self possible? Or is Shelley having a nervous breakdown? Shelley is rattled but cynical enough to have her doubts. Meanwhile Conch suddenly faces serious quality control issues that she must solve to save her job. And then there’s Rafe’s plan to move with the kids to Brazil, with or without Shelley.
Clever, original, and unabashedly silly fun.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-385-54278-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
PROFILES
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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