A good mix of poignancy and sexy fun, with two well-developed protagonists.
A baggage mix-up at LaGuardia Airport leads to a new friendship and more in Middleton’s (London, Can You Wait, 2017, etc.) delightful contemporary romance novel.
Riley Hope, a senior at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, has too much on her plate. She is flat broke; her mother, Maggie, is fighting cancer for the third time; and her three-year boyfriend, Josh King, star of the University of North Dakota’s ice hockey team, has just proposed. There are many reasons Riley doesn’t want to accept, but Josh has promised financial help for her mother’s insurmountable medical bills. And Riley will do anything for Maggie. It’s been Maggie and Riley against the world ever since her father took off. We meet her as she is chasing down a disheveled 20-something who has mistakenly taken her suitcase from the baggage carousel. Ben Fagan, seriously hung over, has just returned from Los Angeles, where he auditioned for a new TV series. The befuddled Scottish lad has no idea how to get himself to the cheap Airbnb he has scored on Canal Street in lower Manhattan. Riley, whose tiny studio apartment is in the East Village, leads him through the transportation maze of New York’s subway system, and the seeds of friendship are planted. Readers will need to wait patiently for that friendship to transition to steamy love. But there are plenty of distractions, both humorous (e.g., Erika Kobayashi’s bachelorette party with male dancers) and serious (Riley’s high-functional depression, Ben’s dyslexia, Maggie’s cancer), to keep a twisty, if occasionally far-fetched, plotline moving quickly. The novel is a stand-alone, although Middleton connects it with two previous books via shared plotlines and characters. While the prose is smooth, carried primarily by fast-moving dialogue, musical references and some colloquial lingo (e.g., FOMO) may be lost on some readers (although a glossary is included).
A good mix of poignancy and sexy fun, with two well-developed protagonists.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9952117-8-0
Page Count: 498
Publisher: Kirkwall Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2024 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.
