Entertaining over-the-top melodrama, with a nonsensical plot pitting an appealing pair of lovers against a dastardly villain.
The adventurous romance of Gabriella Martinez and Richard Harrison continues in Alonso-Sierra’s follow-up to The Coin (2014).
Talented and lovely Gabriella has illustrated a medieval manuscript, The Book of Hours, scheduled for auction at Christie’s in London. The book’s artistry attracts vile Arnold Wickeham, who hopes to coerce Gabriella to sell it to him pre-auction for 250,000 pounds. Meanwhile, Gabriella’s personal life is in turmoil. She’s in love with Richard Harrison, an American intelligence operative who once saved her life; at the time, Gabriella had been reluctant to end the relationship with her husband, Roberto. After a ghastly car accident involving a sanitation truck, comatose Roberto is on life support, jeopardizing the future of his company. Roberto’s affections also wavered; he was en route to meet his lover when the mishap occurred, on the same day Gabriella finally asked for a divorce. As Wickeham’s threats against Gabriella mount, Richard returns to her side. There’s no denying their mutual attraction or that her son, Luisito, looks like him. As the auction date approaches, Wickeham will stop at nothing—including brake tampering, kidnapping, and torture—to secure The Book of Hours. Still, Gabriella adamantly refuses to give in. Elsewhere, scheming April Cranfield, who wants Richard back in her bed, plans to entrap him and bear his child. Sierra’s novel is a lively mix of adventure, drama, and an affecting romantic reunion, marred by some awkward prose: “Gabriella actually owed Roberto a grateful ‘thanks’ for plopping the overflow drop into the bucket of her restraint.” At times, the story feels like an episode of daytime drama, with a wicked but not very bright villain squaring off against a man and a woman heroically determined and cued for rescue. The biggest stumbling block is the premise: it’s obvious Wickeham is behind the threats against Gabriella. He might have used his quarter-million pounds to hire a thief and walk quietly away with the manuscript.
Entertaining over-the-top melodrama, with a nonsensical plot pitting an appealing pair of lovers against a dastardly villain.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-0986209505
Page Count: 314
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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