An imaginative and witty retelling of universally acknowledged truths.
Messina (The Bolingbroke Chit, 2015, etc.) reimagines a classic in her gender-bending, modern-day take on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
In present-day Queens, New York, brothers John and Bennet Bethle are the spine of the Longbourn Collection’s development department. After some persuasion by their parents, they get their youngest brother, Lydon, an internship at the museum as well—but his definition of “internship” is practically synonymous with “Starbucks.” Mr. Meryton, executive director of the Longbourn, is always close by; he would “never trust an employee to do well what he himself could do perfectly”—that is, to land major funding from New York’s richest. Enter Charlotte “Bingley” Bingston, an enthusiastic socialite and chair of the Gold Diamond Advisory Board who's almost as smitten with the local rugelach as she is with John. Her best friend, Darcy Fitzwilliam, a fellow heiress, has a guarded and cold demeanor which earn her little favor from the rest of the cast. Things become complicated when Bennet runs into Georgia Wickham, an estranged childhood friend of Darcy’s, in the lobby of the Longbourn. The entanglements are knottiest at Bingley’s fundraising gala at Netherfield on Park Avenue. Collin Parsons makes his dazzling entrance just as Bingley quits the city suddenly. After 48 “Bingstons,” or days Bingley has been unreachable, both John, who refuses to pine for her, and Bennet, who was “dissed for the financial sector,” are loveless and in desperate need of distraction. When Collin invites Bennet to the Hamptons for a weekend, Messina raises the stakes even higher: there’s a surprise visit from Darcy, and by the time Bennet returns to the city, Lydon is being held by the FBI for grand larceny. It takes a lot of money, influence, and humbling before anyone reaches a mutual understanding. The characters get a little verbose at the end, slowing down the otherwise well-paced plot, but they’ve got quite a bit of explaining to do. Messina maintains the emotional depth of the characters with easy humor despite their wrestling with first impressions gone awry and the consequence of ill-held grudges.
An imaginative and witty retelling of universally acknowledged truths.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-942218-05-0
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Potatoworks Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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
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