This kind of import is definitely an acquired taste.
First novel about two Londoners sabotaging the wedding of a social-climbing chum.
Melanie Pepper and her best friend Fran are miffed beyond belief when Amanda Phillips manages to get engaged to Scottish laird Fraser McConnell. Isn’t it enough that Amanda is petite, perky, blond, and rich? Melanie and Fran were sure all the Right Hons were taken—or gay. Granted, Amanda’s intended dresses shabbily, and his ancestral castle is a pile of rubble, but his title is real enough, and they remember Fraser from their school days as really rather nice in his odd way. Melanie and Fran know that Amanda’s only marrying him for his noble pedigree and a chance to get her picture in the papers, but there’s nothing they can do about it but sulk and drink and scheme. Though she’d like to save Fraser, Melanie has too many other men in her life to worry about: Alex, her ne’er-do-well boyfriend, who dreams of making it big in rock music; and Nick, a hapless accountant who warms her bed when Alex isn’t around. Then Amanda sniffily informs her two friends that they’re not quite what she has in mind for bridesmaids—although, of course, they can attend the pretentious ceremony and contribute a silver place setting or two. Fueled by gallons of alcohol and limitless spite, Melanie and Fran hatch a plot and enlist Fraser’s younger brother, Angus, to help plant smoke bombs at the church and ruin the wedding. The ensuing stampede propels Fraser into loving arms, right where he apparently belongs. Colgan has a lively style, but this malicious little love story is awfully British and awfully brittle: all the girlish shrieking, tacky sex jokes, and class snobbery wear thin in a hurry.
This kind of import is definitely an acquired taste. (Film rights to Warner Bros.)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-446-52647-9
Page Count: 278
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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
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