Not as fun as Prada, but Weisberger’s fans won’t care.
Weisberger (The Devil Wears Prada, 2003) again traces the misadventures of a hapless young thing sucked into a glamorous career that is psychologically and physically crushing.
Bette has spent the past few post-college years living in a run-down Manhattan shoebox, slaving away at a finance job and hanging out with her best friend at a dive bar. When she impulsively quits her job, her famous columnist uncle helps her land a position at the ultra-chic PR firm Kelly & Company, where her responsibilities include being seen at the sleekest nightclubs and planning prestigious parties. Despite moaning about her lack of connections, sex appeal and designer clothes, Bette falls into step with her coke-addled colleagues and is soon slipping under the velvet rope at trendy hotspots like Bungalow 8. Her boss is thrilled when Bette appears in a notorious gossip column after being spotted with the city's sexiest bachelor, Philip Weston, Yale grad and ex-boyfriend of a fleet of models. Bette’s boss has made it clear that she wants to continue seeing the company's name in the papers, and soon Bette is embroiled in a strangely asexual relationship with Philip. As she is swallowed by the shallow world of celebrity kowtowing and frenetic partying, Bette alienates her best friend and turns off a well-meaning, sweet bouncer at Bungalow 8. When the gossip columns suddenly grow more vicious and personal, Bette starts to wonder if she's making the right choices—and all comes to a head at the prized Playboy party she has been planning for months. Weisberger’s attempt to turn the frothy Lizzie Grubman world of Manhattan public relations on its head lacks edge.
Not as fun as Prada, but Weisberger’s fans won’t care.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-6229-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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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