A fun, feisty, feminist romp through Jewish folklore as an ancient spirit returns to haunt a modern-day London lesbian. Two hundred years ago, when Anya's lover, Gittel, broke her promise of ``undying sisterhood'' by marrying a Torah scholar, Anya conjured up a vicious curse whereby Gittel and every first-born female descendant for 33 generations would be possessed by a dybbuk and bear only daughters. Dybbuk Kokos, the soul-stealer who gets assigned this job by the Head Office, runs into trouble when the family turns to her nemesis, the Sage of Limnititzk, for help; he drives Kokos from Gittel and traps her in a tree. When a bolt of lightning releases Kokos two centuries later, her reacclimation to modern times proves challenging. The Head Office has been taken over by a high-tech multinational corporation with everything from a plan to terminate her contract to an employee health club. (Who knew demons had to watch their figures?) Kokos insists on tracking down Gittel's 20th-century descendant, but she discovers that Rainbow Rosenbloom, a political, lesbian film-critic-cum-taxi- driver, is a tough nut to haunt. Everyone from the bevy of aunts who look after her to her friends and co-workers already consider Rainbow a little crazy, so Kokos has to modify her approach; instead of making Rainbow lose it, she makes her into a Nice Jewish Girl. On the trail of a beautiful but straight orthodox woman, Rainbow even considers marrying a man and returning to her roots to be closer to her dream girl. This plan serves Kokos well, since it also ensures future generations to haunt. But Galford (Queendom Come, not reviewed) closes the novel with a surprise twist that shows just how formidable Rainbow can be. Craft, camp, and chutzpah.
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1994
ISBN: 1-878067-51-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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
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
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