A carton of rum-soaked bonbons. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
Paste jewels of fairytale erotica.
Rollins’s stories may not be strong on suavity or elegance, or up to the better erotica collections for young lonelies, or to the lavender exercises of A.N. Roquelaure (a.k.a. Anne Rice) in the let’s-spank-Sleeping-Beauty mode—but without doubt they're passingly effective as an aid for young ladies who wish to sweeten the midnight sheets with a dark dream of swollen and refulgent cushions of flesh invaded by an “engorged thick knob.” One standout does strive for stronger writing, the title piece, a satire on the bare-nippled lingerie and ornamental pubic silks of the Victoria’s Secret line of boudoir-wear for sulky bottoms. The prude empress, scammed by dealers who sell her weaving that remains invisible to the vile, vulgar, and lustful, gets decked out in a fantastic red bustier of scandalous slenderness that gives her bosom a lush lift and lets her hips blossom while her long pink nipples stand out “exposed, erect and pulsating, just above the lace-trimmed edge of the half-moon cups.” The delights of brother/sister wrestling are revealed in “Hansel and Gretel,” told in a really cool way (Gretel: “See, ever since my father married my stepmother—who, of course, was the typical evil stepmother who hated the children of her husband’s first wife and was completely jealous of any attention he gave us—”). The prince awakes Sleeping Beauty with a kiss on her “throbbing, raging clit” that has it “quivering with liquid incandescence.” Then we have Snow White fellating the Seven Dwarfs, and Red Riding Hood engaging in secret acts under the blanket, her lonely “purple-dark slit and arching spine” in “a frenzy of flying fingers” before the redheaded curls that adorn her mound meet up with the wolf’s “powerful, beastly tongue” and “ravenous mouth”—and so on to “Rapunzel,” “The Three Little Pigs,” “Goldie and the Three Bare Bachelors,” and Cinderella in her stiletto glass slippers meeting her princely foot fetishist, who licks “every nook and cranny of that plump bit of flesh.”
A carton of rum-soaked bonbons. Don’t say you weren’t warned.Pub Date: July 17, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60705-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
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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