Unassuming yet powerhouse attorney Jennifer Walters and her secret alter ego, the publicity-loving She-Hulk, must learn to coexist and balance their physical and intellectual skills while fighting crime and injustice in the courtroom and on the streets, and possibly reclaiming the love of Jennifer’s life.
On the first day of the year, Jennifer prepares a list of Valentine’s Day Resolutions (New Year’s Resolutions being too cliché and statistically difficult) in order to conquer the fact that she has no job, no home and is persona non grata within her Avengers community, thanks to raucous She-Hulk. As a world-class attorney, she finds a job pretty quickly, taking on an inventor who’s allegedly created a faulty product that is killing people. Unfortunately, the senior partner of her new firm is the father of Ellis, the man Jennifer hooked up with years ago and has never forgotten; and the man accused of unleashing the faulty product is Ellis’ best friend. If that isn’t enough, Jennifer is supposed to submit to counseling when it’s She-Hulk who has the problem, and who has time for that when she’s litigating a high-profile case with her brand new job? Oh, and one of the attorneys she’s supposed to be working with is Ellis’ cold witch of a fiancee. Publisher Hyperion is staking a claim on a comic book–romance crossover market with popular Marvel characters, and She-Hulk (along with X-Men’s Rogue) is their first attempt to capture a comic-book sensibility in fiction form with a major romantic arc. Acosta has created an interesting and intriguing character study of the seemingly mismatched Jennifer and She-Hulk and has introduced a powerful past-love romantic storyline that somehow makes sense for both sides of the personality equation. It’s not clear how close to traditional canon the characters are and, therefore, how the purists of the comic-book universe will feel, but despite a few annoyances in the storyline (e.g. why would you not make a second call to the man you’re madly in love with?), it’s an engaging success.
A fun, escapist romantic romp with superheroes—who can resist?
Pub Date: June 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4013-1101-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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
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
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