Contrived and convoluted in effecting feel-good spirituality.
This sequel to The Wednesday Sisters (2008) follows a second generation of sensitive friends as they travel to a cottage in England’s Lake District to uncover secrets and bond, as Clayton’s female characters are wont to do.
Asha, a 40-ish lawyer also called Hope by her friends, has come to the cottage where her mother, Allison, an unpublished writer of children’s stories about animals, spent a lot of time before her recent death. Asha is accompanied by Anna Page, a 51-year-old heart surgeon and the daughter of literary editor Kath; and 48-year-old librarian Julie, the daughter of Linda and sister of recently deceased Jamie. Each woman has issues: Asha, whose maternal grandparents had nothing to do with her because her father was Indian, is facing a crisis in her marriage to Kevin, who wants to start a family; never married Anna Page loves to play matchmaker for her friends, and even her mother, but has always avoided commitment/intimacy herself, probably because she was scarred by her father’s long-term adultery; grieving Julie has been having an affair with Jamie’s widower. In England, whiny Asha, who resents drama queen Anna Page’s closeness to Allison, finds Allison’s journal in which Beatrix Potter figures prominently, as if the dead author were still alive—passionate appreciation of Beatrix Potter is required to enjoy this novel. Asha also discovers both Allison’s secret about her own heritage and her secret relationship with wealthy neighbor Graham. Meanwhile, Anna Page manipulates bookish, guilt-ridden Julie into a seemingly unlikely relationship with boatman Robbie, who is really a poet from Ireland on his own secret mission concerning his dead wife. Anna Page, who has a tendency to hand nice men over to others and keep jerks for herself, also tries to set up her visiting mother with Graham. But the men, handsome and sensitive as they may be, are really not the point, since the message is that these women solve each other’s problems and know each other best.
Contrived and convoluted in effecting feel-good spirituality.Pub Date: July 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-345-53028-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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