None
Egomaniacs in fast cars, Armani-clad spoiled rich kids, their movie mogul parents, ``lavishly appointed'' Tinseltown homes, and always-sensational sex—it's Collins romping on her well-trodden but ever-fertile ground. Jordanna Levitt and her pals—precocious, underachieving children of the movie industry's most important and dysfunctional families—are known as ``The Hollywood Five.'' Jordanna is a slut without ambition, Marjorie Sanderson is suicidal, Shep Worth is in the closet, Grant Lennon and Cheryl Landers operate a call girl operation. When she's bounced from the mansion of her producer dad and his pregnant, younger-than-she-is new wife, Jordanna takes a job as the assistant (and later costar) of ``incredibly good- looking'' movie star/director Bobby Rush, the child of a brilliant but cruel famous actor. Their devastating physical attractions and broken homes make the two kindred spirits, but Jordanna's got a problem that even a top Bel Air psychotherapist couldn't solve: She's being hunted by a madman against whom she testified at his trial for murder. Luckily for her, handsome Brooklyn cop Michael Scorsinni has just relocated to L.A. He and a top-notch celebrity reporter for Style Wars, the gorgeous and down-to-earth Kennedy Chase, team up to stop the crime (as well as grapple with their own lives' melodramas) and in so doing, fall in love. All this races in front of a backdrop of superlatives: the hottest clubs, the harshest drugs, the seamiest sex, the meanest mafia, and the prettiest posers. The Hollywood Kids are palimpsests upon which are listed the traumas of the trust fund; Michael and Kennedy are cut from the ``beautiful but damaged'' cloth; supporting characters (the black cop buddy, the lusty Latina newscaster) are straight from Central Casting. Plot, though suspenseful, offers few surprises. Still, it's a Porscheload of fun. It's logical: Hollywood Wives and Hollywood Husbands breed Less Than 9 Zero 210 offspring. (First printing of 500,000; Literary Guild main selection; author tour)
None NonePub Date: Sept. 19, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-66627-4
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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