Clearly smart and talented, Semple never satisfactorily accomplishes the difficult task of balancing nasty comedy and...
Former television comedy writer Semple offers a semi-satirical, funny-sad romance about a spoiled Hollywood wife, a former television writer, who considers risking all for a wholly inappropriate affair with a sleazy musician.
Violet is the bored, inattentive mother of one-year-old Dot and the unhappy wife to exacting music impresario David when she and bass player Teddy meet cute in a men’s room. Setting aside his greasy hair and coarse conversation, Teddy’s a junkie in AA and a self-described sex addict. Violet, who lives her life according to Stephen Sondheim lyrics, is charmed despite her revulsion. Not only does she pay to have Teddy’s car repaired, soon she is sending Dot to the babysitter and David to a yoga retreat so she and Teddy can have (graphically) dirty sex in her multimillion-dollar Richard Neutra house on Mulholland Drive. David, a self-made man who can be a son of a bitch but who genuinely loves his wife, realizes Violet is cheating and works through his anger in the yoga sweat lodge until he decides to love the marriage back together. Self-absorbed Violet is torn and distracted, but aside from when Dot sustains a minor injury due to maternal negligence, her melodrama is internal. On the other hand, Teddy has actual problems, including Hepatitis C and a lack of disposable income, not to mention that taste for drugs. His feelings for Violet remain ambiguous until he shows emotional courage as his physical strength ebbs. A subplot concerns David’s mercenary and unbelievably dense sister who marries for money and fame, only to learn that her new hubby has (horrors!) Asperger’s syndrome. Her questionable character is supposedly excused by her trauma as a diabetic, and she experiences spiritual redemption after contracting Hep-C: In an unhappy coincidence at her wedding she injects her Humalog with the same needle Teddy has used to shoot up.
Clearly smart and talented, Semple never satisfactorily accomplishes the difficult task of balancing nasty comedy and romantic uplift.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-316-03116-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose...
Sparks (The Longest Ride, 2013, etc.) serves up another heaping helping of sentimental Southern bodice-rippage.
Gone are the blondes of yore, but otherwise the Sparks-ian formula is the same: a decent fellow from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches falls in love with a decent girl from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches—and is still suffering the consequences. The guy is innately intelligent but too quick to throw a punch, the girl beautiful and scary smart. If you hold a fatalistic worldview, then you’ll know that a love between them can end only in tears. If you hold a Sparks-ian one, then true love will prevail, though not without a fight. Voilà: plug in the character names, and off the story goes. In this case, Colin Hancock is the misunderstood lad who’s decided to reform his hard-knuckle ways but just can’t keep himself from connecting fist to face from time to time. Maria Sanchez is the dedicated lawyer in harm’s way—and not just because her boss is a masher. Simple enough. All Colin has to do is punch the partner’s lights out: “The sexual harassment was bad enough, but Ken was a bully as well, and Colin knew from his own experience that people like that didn’t stop abusing their power unless someone made them. Or put the fear of God into them.” No? No, because bound up in Maria’s story, wrinkled with the doings of an equally comely sister, there’s a stalker and a closet full of skeletons. Add Colin’s back story, and there’s a perfect couple in need of constant therapy, as well as a menacing cop. Get Colin and Maria to smooching, and the plot thickens as the storylines entangle. Forget about love—can they survive the evil that awaits them out in the kudzu-choked woods?
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose corn syrup, stickily sweet but irresistible.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2061-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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