An often engaging mix of soap-operatic melodrama and rom-com gratification.
Four women discover that their conflicts can bring them closer together in this novel about family, love, and self-esteem.
The Aaldenbergs are strict believers in tradition. Their lives revolve around the family hardware store—a centerpiece of their small hometown, where livelihoods are driven by tourist seasons, loans, and the generosity of neighbors. The family is thrown into disarray, however, when their patriarch dies from cancer. Gwen, the eldest sister at 22, is desperate to leave for Boston, but feels held back by an obligation to bring the family out of financial straits. Betta, 20, dreams of owning the store and leaving her own mark on the town but feels overshadowed by Gwen. Teenage Esmerelda gets involved in high school vendettas and steals things from the family store as she tries to find herself. And Wanda, the matriarch, falls into a deep depression after discovering that her spending habits have put the family in debt. Meanwhile, separate infidelity scandals involving Gwen and Betta threaten to tear the family apart. With the riveting intrigue and melodrama of a soap opera, Mercer (Dark & Stormy, 2017) infuses rich psychoanalytical insight into each gesture and conversation: “Esmerelda loved how his smiles worked in fractions. She liked measuring them, what made them pass a quarter to a half, and what kind of seriously fabulous business pushed him to three-fourths.” But Mercer’s tendency to explicitly and repeatedly state each character’s central flaws and insecurities renders them predictable. This is especially the case with the underdeveloped love interests and antagonists, as relationships seem unable to survive on unconditional love and acceptance. Despite these histrionics (and occasional typos), Mercer’s prose is lucid and her themes of redemption and reinvention are resonant: “ ‘People come and people go.’ And after they go…all you’re left with is you,” thinks Betta at one point. Overall, this novel is more than just a wild drama about romance and family; it’s about learning how to deal with loss, choose what matters most, and be happy with who you are.
An often engaging mix of soap-operatic melodrama and rom-com gratification.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73213-321-1
Page Count: 339
Publisher: Bare Ink
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
