Sassy and packed with more plot twists than a Real World marathon: likely to be snapped up eagerly by teen and preteen...
The further adventures of Jessica Darling, she of the overly detailed journal.
The brainy and independent Jessica (Sloppy Firsts, not reviewed), author of this sequel’s journal entries, is one of the more endearing offspring of these post–Bridget Jones years. Jessica is in her senior year at Pineville High, just another horrible high school somewhere in New Jersey filled with all the usual cliques and adolescent idiocy. Jessica knows she should be getting her act together and not thinking about too-cute Marcus—who she almost lost her virginity to in the first Jessica novel—and how now he’s sleeping with every girl who looks his way. Her clueless “friends” embody a range of types. There’s Sara, a bubbly screamer who interjects “Omigod!” every three words; Bridget, a gorgeous but insecure blond who says “like” every three words (see the difference); Manda, who spouts pop-feminist babble when she’s not snaking other girl’s boyfriends; and so on. Jessica misses her best friend, Hope, who moved away, and she has to find out who’s behind the “Pineville Low” gossip e-mail that’s been making snooty comments about her virginal status. Then comes Len, a terminal geek who’s now devastatingly cute and seems to like her. Although one has to get past all the CAPITALIZING and EXCITING DEVELOPMENTS!!! (this is an adolescent’s journal, after all), Jessica’s less-than-earth-shattering life (What college will accept her? Will Len kiss her? What’s Marcus up to?) are tossed across the page with breezy bravado. Cosmo and Glamour writer McCafferty has the post-’90s teenage mindset down to a tee and can reference trash culture with the best of them, but problems arise when she ventures beyond the stereotype.
Sassy and packed with more plot twists than a Real World marathon: likely to be snapped up eagerly by teen and preteen McCafferty fans.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-609-80791-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003
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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