Tepid soap opera from the usually lively Deveraux. As revenge scenarios go, these lack bite—and the unsophisticated prose...
Popular romancer Deveraux (Temptation, 2000, etc.) poses a question: What if you could go back in time and lead a different life?
And three very different women who met briefly 20 years earlier reunite and discover the answer. Of course, they only expected to swap family photos and lie to each other about how young they still look. There’s Madison, born out of wedlock, uneducated, formerly a budding supermodel from a tiny Montana town, who gave up her career for the rich boy who once said she wasn’t good enough. A horrific accident left Roger partially paralyzed, but Madison selflessly nursed him back to relative health and then married him, until he dumped her again. There’s Ellie, bestselling writer, whose husband, mooching musician Martin, took her for every penny she had in divorce court. (And to add insult to injury, she went on to gain 40 pounds.) There's Leslie, bored to death by her safe suburban existence and Alan, her insurance agent husband who has to have everything his way. Leslie’s family walks all over her, and she’s never done anything important with her life (this is somehow all their fault). This dreary trio gathers at a cute-as-can-be summer cottage in Maine where they catch up, in tiresome detail, on each other’s lives. On a whim, they visit Madame Zoya, a mysterious fortuneteller who sends them back in time. Madison meets a nice doctor, has a passel of kids, gets a physical therapy degree, and opens a clinic. Ellie latches onto the hunk of her dreams (a lawyer), who devises a way to outfox her nasty ex once and for all; they have a son and live happily ever after. And Leslie tells Alan she wants some changes made. Wonder of wonders, he complies and so do her bratty kids.
Tepid soap opera from the usually lively Deveraux. As revenge scenarios go, these lack bite—and the unsophisticated prose doesn't help.Pub Date: May 8, 2001
ISBN: 0-671-01418-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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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