Sex in a bunch of different cities.
A self-appointed ambassador for American women studies her single sisters around the world.
This debut novel from Sex and the City writer Tuccillo (co-author: He’s Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys, 2004) stars NYC publicist Julie Jensen and a quartet of her obsessive friends. New age convert Serena contemplates a vow of celibacy while high-powered attorney Alice quits her job to husband-hunt full time. Meanwhile, maniacal divorcee Georgia is furious over her husband’s infidelity with a samba dancer while fragile wallflower Ruby channels her own depression into volunteer work euthanizing pets. During a girls’ night out, Julie experiences a moment of clarity: “My God, we are pathetic creatures. We are lawyers and publicists and businesswomen and mothers with blow-dried hair and lipstick, all just waiting for the sun of male attention to shine down upon us and make us feel alive again.” Armed with an emboldened sense of her own self-worth, she sets off on a world-spanning Grand Tour to investigate how single life translates across cultures. With stops in Paris, Rome, Rio, Bali and Beijing, the fictional tour (based largely upon the author’s real-life global research) features a plethora of rhetorical questions about men, women and missed connections, punctuated by charismatic cameos from an unrepentant French philanderer, a Brazilian porn star and a feisty Aussie self-help guru, among other rare specimens. Back in Manhattan, the ensemble’s neuroses rear their ugly heads as Georgia endangers her children over a boyfriend, Serena contemplates sex with her swami and Ruby stalks gay couples to father her child. When Tuccillo captures the surprising contradictions of relationships, as when Jensen discovers the unlikely happiness of an Indian woman’s arranged marriage, she scores. But Julie’s giggly sexcapades and her compatriot’s ill-advised misadventures, while passably entertaining, are about as psychologically nourishing as a half-hour of television. In fact, too much of the book is reminiscent of Sex and the City.
Sex in a bunch of different cities.Pub Date: June 10, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-3412-9
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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