Kinky, touching, emotional, and sexually intense.
Still mourning the loss of a friend due to an accident during sadomasochistic sex, Kamen moves in with his boyfriend, Ryan, and has to navigate a spectrum of mixed feelings as he and his close-knit set of friends move into their own lives, loves, and levels of kink.
Kamen is in love, and for some reason he can’t comprehend, his very close friends aren’t happy about it. In his mind, Ryan is perfect for him. They share a goofy sense of humor, an explosive chemistry, and a “we’ll try anything once, but stop if either of us doesn’t like it” sensibility that is a "totes" turn-on for Kamen, whose happy-go-lucky personality is sometimes mistaken for a dim wit or a lack of maturity—possibly also somewhat due to his use of words like “totes,” “amazerbeam,” and “amazigasmitastic.” But at heart, Kamen is a kind, open-hearted young man who doesn’t brood, can be depended on to keep a secret, and is deeply loyal to people he cares about. Which is why he feels disheartened and a little betrayed when his friends subtly reject Ryan. For Kamen, Ryan’s adventurous nature brings out a curiosity he never knew he had, which leads them into all kinds of audacious experiences Kamen discovers he really likes—and a few he doesn’t. These include experimenting with female clothes and lingerie, water sports, and, thanks to some scornful taunting from a mean-spirited fellow client at a local dungeon, an unexpected romp into competitive pony play. Kamen’s first-person perspective is funny and very present, while Rock does a terrific job of creating authentic, realistic characters who are exploring many layers of romance and kink while delving into emotionally deep territory: the preventable death of a friend, the reactions of friends when one begins to explore new aspects of self, and the inevitable tension of grief, guilt, and moving on. Still, not for the faint of heart, since it includes graphic sex scenes and realistic portrayals of a variety of kinky lifestyles.
Kinky, touching, emotional, and sexually intense.Pub Date: April 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62649-348-3
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Riptide
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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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