A winner for romance and chick-lit fans as well as Anglophiles and geeks.
An aspiring playwright copes with her boyfriend’s newfound fame in this sequel.
Twenty-four-year-old Alex Sinclair is the envy of many an English teen. Her boyfriend of nearly two years is 25-year-old heartthrob Mark Keegan, star of the fictional BBC drama Lairds and Liars. Unfortunately, dating a celebrity is not all it’s cracked up to be. As Mark runs himself ragged filming around the globe, their brief reunions are often measured in hours rather than days, and Alex misses the time they were both struggling artists working at the National Theatre. After finding a ring in Mark’s backpack, Alex looks forward to marriage as a remedy to the growing distance between them, but curiously, he doesn’t pop the question. Besides his reluctance to commit, Alex has to deal with trash-talking fans, unflattering tabloid stories, and Mark’s obnoxious agent, Wink. Everything finally boils over after a fateful New Year’s Eve party; Mark’s latest co-star, Fallon Delaney, divulges some incriminating secrets. Alex retreats to her father’s house in Manchester to reconnect with herself and later returns to London with a new lease on life. Here, Middleton (London Belongs to Me, 2016) has mastered chick lit. While the plot is driven by Alex’s love life, her career and personal growth (particularly her mental health) feature just as prominently. Alex’s friends—her fiery “bezzie mate,” Lucy; the ever exuberant Freddie; and his stylish fiance, Simon—are fully fleshed out, with arcs of their own. The settings are vibrant and detailed, giving an accurate snapshot of life in cities like London, Dublin, and New York, complete with nods to the theater scene and fandom culture. The narration is well-crafted, full of seemingly innocuous tidbits that later become significant, raunchy banter between friends, and the kind of sweet nothings that hopeless romantics die for. In the end, it’s ultimately quite rewarding to see Alex come into her own, with or without Mark by her side.
A winner for romance and chick-lit fans as well as Anglophiles and geeks.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9952117-5-9
Page Count: 454
Publisher: Kirkwall Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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