Another Bridget Jones clone, with similar obsessions about weight, drink, fags, and all the sex nobody's getting. Mostly...
When an imaginary boyfriend isn't enough . . . hire an escort.
Sophy Metcalfe is almost 30, and her interfering mother thinks it's high time she got married. Sick of the nagging, Sophy invents “Dominic,” a tall, handsome, up-and-coming investment banker who seems to have a lot of excuses for never showing up in person. But Mum insists he not wiggle out of escorting Sophy to her sister Belinda's wedding. Desperate, Sophy calls a highly respectable London escort service, which supplies Josh Carmichael, former Royal Marine. Josh is predictably tall and handsome, with a “crookedy” smile and “greeny-browny eyes like a river with the sun on them.” Not that a sophisticated woman like Sophy would fall in love just like that. First, there must be much irritable banter as she and Josh get to know each other before the ceremony. While Josh convinces the clueless, chatterbox mother and pompous father that he is indeed Dominic, Sophy’s dirty-minded friends know about her scheme and tease her relentlessly. Sophy simply sniffs, points out that theirs is just a business relationship, and continues to invent adjectives ending in “y.” After the wedding, she yearns for his company and starts playing girlish games to get his attention, like pretending her scruffy friend Ace is really her lover to make Josh jealous. Josh's countermove: showing up with an infant under each arm. Sophy is outraged, assuming he's married, but softens when she finds out he's babysitting his sister's twins just to be nice. The thin plot thickens a bit when Belinda jilts her new husband just before the honeymoon. Sophy, meanwhile, decides there are no sure things in life and she might as well gather her rosebuds. Fortunately, Josh is waiting for her with open arms.
Another Bridget Jones clone, with similar obsessions about weight, drink, fags, and all the sex nobody's getting. Mostly familiar debut, with a few funny lines.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-380-81897-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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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