You’ll breeze through this one like you would a Saturday spin class with the most fabulous playlist and the promise of...
Unofficial rule of the New York fashion industry: if you must buy the bruffin, you absolutely cannot be seen eating said bruffin.
Janey Sweet, co-founder of a wedding-dress company called B, doesn’t realize she’s committing a crime until B designer and her best friend, Beau, shoves a tabloid with a picture of her eating a bruffin ("the love child of a brioche and a muffin") in her face and ends their breakfast conversation by calling her the “f” word—fat—which is unacceptable according to their business arrangement formed decades ago. Since B wedding dresses are notorious for not going above a size 4, Janey is out until she drops her bruffin habit and 30 pounds along with it. No joke. It doesn’t matter that she’s lost both of her parents within a year or that she’s going through a divorce. To Beau, being skinny is the only thing that matters. With the same delicious brand of satire that Sykes and Piazza became known for in The Knockoff (2015), Janey falls down the rabbit hole of fitness trends, skinny mommy blogs, and juice cleanses in search of a weight-loss savior. If you think naked yoga isn’t real, Google it. If you don’t think you can laugh at scenarios involving psychedelic cactus and an exclusive healing ceremony in Brooklyn, then you won’t appreciate this book’s particular flavor of excess. The journey to skinny is livened up by a memorable supporting cast: there’s CJ, Janey’s college friend who is levelheaded about everything besides her weight (in that respect, she’s a maniac); Jacob, a superattractive, dumpster-diving single dad; and Ivy, Janey’s younger cousin, a former ballerina–turned–SoarBarre instructor with the mouth of a sailor. The journey culminates with Janey becoming a follower of “The Workout,” the latest craze promising to have you 15 pounds lighter, as long as you’re able to pay the exorbitant price associated with a retreat to St. Lucia. Though it’s hard to sympathize with someone who can afford to have healthy meals catered on a daily basis, this novel is about indulging in the ridiculous. You’ll have to overlook details like sporadic point-of-view changes and the fact that St. Lucia is not actually a Spanish-speaking country on the path to finding your inner “warrior queen.”
You’ll breeze through this one like you would a Saturday spin class with the most fabulous playlist and the promise of brunch cocktails after.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-54180-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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