Sweet and intense, with delightful magical accents, a delectable romance—and yummy recipes.
Broke, divorced and disheartened, Portia Cuthcart leaves Texas for Manhattan, determined to sort out her life and finally embrace her magical way with food.
Portia has inherited a magical gift from a long line of Texas women who offered advice and, inexplicably, the perfect healing dish, but a tragic event caused her to turn her back on this "knowing" and live a normal life. Years later, betrayed by her Texas politician husband, she flees to New York City, where her two sisters live and where she owns the garden apartment in a brownstone. Her sisters have sold their portions of the house to Gabriel Kane, a renowned financier who expects her to sign over her share as well but is stymied when she moves in instead. When Kane’s younger daughter, Ariel, stumbles into a fabulous meal Portia makes for her sisters, she convinces her father to offer her a job as their cook. At first resistant, Portia accepts when she realizes her ex-husband is reneging on her divorce settlement, then sets about trying to open a cafe styled after The Glass Kitchen, a restaurant her family owned for generations in Texas. But as her sisters’ lives unravel, and she becomes more entwined in the Kanes’ well-being, Portia realizes how little she knows about the gift and how unprepared she is to handle the grief and confusion of the family upstairs. Lee takes a new magical direction after the success of Emily and Einstein (2011) and brings a light yet emotional touch as she combines food fiction with magical realism in a satisfying effort only slightly marred by Portia’s continually fluctuating feelings about her gift. However, Kane’s tight-lipped Yankee demeanor paired with Portia’s conflicted feelings make for powerful—and sexy—conflict, and Ariel’s attempts to fix her fractured family are affecting and pave the way for true connection with their magical neighbor.
Sweet and intense, with delightful magical accents, a delectable romance—and yummy recipes.Pub Date: June 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-312-38227-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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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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