Sensual for a Regency, and genuinely fun.
Lady Sophie York is set to elope—but with whom?
Sophie has no way of knowing that her fiancé, a dull but dependable nobleman, has injured his leg and can’t get up the obligatory ladder. Under cover of darkness and in disguise, he’s sent his best friend Patrick Foakes (younger twin brother of Alex Foakes, the hero of Potent Pleasures, 1999) in his stead to fetch her. Adventurous to a fault, the rakish and handsome Patrick ascends—but doesn't come back down. After all, Sophie is astonishingly beautiful, and one taste of her sweet lips makes him claim a second, bringing a change of heart to the befuddled Sophie. While waiting at the window, in fact, she’d been thinking it over and had decided not to elope with Braddon Chatwin, Earl of Slaslow. So Patrick seizes this golden chance to bed her—and, several weeks later, to wed her. Sophie’s French maman is furious. How could her only child spurn the Earl of Slaslow for a mere Honourable like Patrick? Well, her headstrong daughter has advanced ideas about love, and worse, an excellent education, which should prove useful when she and Patrick (just to make amends) scheme to fool the town by turning a pretty wench the jilted earl fancies into a semblance of a lady. And her education will prove even more useful when Sophie takes up the study of Turkish, hoping to accompany Patrick, an envoy for the Crown, to Turkey, where he must persuade the eccentric Sultan to become England’s ally against Napoleon. The story weakens as Sophie encounters a pair of villains masquerading as Turks, who threaten the rather silly Sultan with an exploding inkwell. The intrepid and intelligent Sophie, of course, saves the day, and Patrick falls in love with her all over again by the end of this lively and vividly written tale.
Sensual for a Regency, and genuinely fun.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-33361-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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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