Much livelier than Smith’s first (Queen Bee of Mimosa Branch, 2001). Great title and fabulous cover art will have readers...
Rowdy southern feminist fantasy for women of a certain age.
The Mademoiselles, members of a high-school social club in 1960s Atlanta, have gone their separate ways, but some of them stayed the best of friends, morphing in middle age into the Red Hat Club. They meet for lunch (wearing red hats, of course) and dish the dirt. Here’s the latest: Diane’s husband Harold is probably cheating on her with a floozy. Sister Red Hats Georgia, Teeny, Linda, and SuSu swing into action. With the exception of Linda, happily married to a nice urologist who adores her, they’ve endured hellish divorces themselves, or they’re still married and running scared. The worldwide oversupply of avaricious bimbos is a constant worry to these once-loyal wives and mothers, who are determined to see to it that Harold gets his comeuppance. Diane begins to follow a paper trail, finding and copying documents that prove beyond a doubt he is hiding income and maintaining a hidden love nest—definitely not proper behavior for a distinguished southern banker. Adding taped phone calls and secret computer files to the stash of incriminating evidence can’t hurt. Sisterhood is powerful, and the Red Hats already know how to get themselves out of trouble before they get into it. Brief segues to fond reminiscences of their teenage selves, complete with heartthrobs, embarrassing parents, and physical changes, and then it’s back to the chase: Linda’s urologist husband confides that some of his male patients have come in with embarrassing minor injuries, thanks to a mysterious dominatrix who likes hurting men so much she does it for free. News flash: the unknown woman may be a former Mademoiselle! Will Harold be the next to get spanked?
Much livelier than Smith’s first (Queen Bee of Mimosa Branch, 2001). Great title and fabulous cover art will have readers reaching for it.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-31693-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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BOOK REVIEW
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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BOOK REVIEW
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