Beach readers may find sand gnats more entertaining.
Lee, the much younger ex-wife of Billy Joel, debuts with a novel whose self-important heroine is a famous actor’s much younger wife who leaves him (with prenup) when he cheats on her only to find true love weeks later with her surf instructor.
Screenwriter Emma is at a Metropolitan Museum of Art gala when she catches “blockbuster movie star” husband Garrett kissing her old friend Lily. Flash back seven years to the beginning of the romance between Emma and Garrett. While Lily, then her college roommate, is rich and spoiled, Emma is a scholarship student from Kentucky who also manages to be a killer dresser. She dreams of becoming a screenwriter (her telling all-time favorites: Dirty Dancing, When Harry Met Sally and Breakfast at Tiffany’s). Working on a movie set, Lily quickly catches Garrett’s eye. Despite his reputation as a womanizer, he falls hard for Emma. Soon they are dining at fine restaurants (names provided) and hanging out in his suite at the Carlyle. She cuts short her family Christmas to vacation on his yacht near St. Bart’s and buy $12,000 of clothing on his credit card. At the wedding that soon follows, Emma slights Lily, sharing the ceremony’s big secret only with her childhood friend Grace. Grace becomes Emma’s personal assistant and finds an adorable West Village apartment. Garrett moves Emma into a fab Soho loft and finances her screenplay debut, the story of their romance—a huge hit. Emma’s struggling to conceive a second script when her marriage collapses. She kicks Garrett out and decamps, at Grace’s suggestion, to Mexico to recuperate. There she discovers the spiritual power of surfing, especially after she and her hunky surf instructor have “sex for hours.” Could a whole new life be on the horizon?
Beach readers may find sand gnats more entertaining.Pub Date: June 21, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-8359-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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