While it lacks the bite of Weisberger’s beloved The Devil Wears Prada, this is still a fun, fast-paced read filled with...
Bestseller Weisberger (Revenge Wears Prada, 2013, etc.) follows her formula of launching a naïve young woman into uncharted territory.
After a devastating injury at Wimbledon, tennis pro Charlotte “Charlie” Silver knows she needs a major change if she wants to take her career to the next level. Known for her squeaky-clean and always-polite image, Charlie doesn’t argue when the Wimbledon officials deem her sneakers in violation of their strict uniform standards. At the last minute, she's forced to scramble and play one of the biggest matches of her life in someone else’s shoes, resulting in a fall that injures both her wrist and her Achilles tendon. As she heals, she knows she'll have to fire her good friend and sweetheart of a coach, Marcy, and sets her sights on Todd Feltner, a tough men’s coach known for his brash attitude and cultivation of champions. Todd not only overhauls Charlie’s training and fitness regimen, barking at her if she even glances at a cup of coffee or a simple carbohydrate, but he makes over her image as well. Gone is good-girl Charlie with her bright outfits and ribbon woven through her cheery braid. After all, did she really work her whole life to settle for being “the twenty-third best female tennis player on earth”? Rebranded and restyled as the “Warrior Princess,” she feels fierce in her all-black tennis garb. Todd even goes so far as to help orchestrate a steamy romance with tennis champion Marco Vallejo, giving plenty of fodder to the press. While Charlie’s tennis game definitely improves, she struggles with some of the nastier aspects of her new life.
While it lacks the bite of Weisberger’s beloved The Devil Wears Prada, this is still a fun, fast-paced read filled with well-crafted and memorable characters.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7821-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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