Five unmarried guests manage to come together—and fall apart—during an upscale wedding at a Maryland country club.
Unconvinced that there is any upside to being a bridesmaid, New York City casting director Hannah nonetheless feels a sense of obligation when her dear college friend Bee requests her services. Aside from the bother of having to buy a special halter bra for the occasion, singleton Hannah is anxious about seeing her ex Tom, who will be there with his new girlfriend, a guidance counselor named Jaime. Staying with Hannah is another college friend, Vicki, a creative type with a dull corporate job in Rochester. She also has a mild case of depression that she combats with a special sunlamp she carries around in a guitar case. Vickie and Hannah’s Texas friend Rob, alas, is a last-minute no show for the wedding, although his presence is missed. A laid-back underachiever with a tendency to disappoint people, Rob carries a torch for Hannah, although his only commitment is to his dog Liz, a rescue mutt with epilepsy. Through texts, he gets a play-by-play of the event, while struggling with his own mixed feelings—and a sudden emergency. To calm her pre-wedding jitters, Hannah mixes a couple of mystery pills (offered by the controlling matron-of-honor, Dawn) with alcohol, and proceeds to make a fool of herself during the inevitable confrontation with Tom, who remembers the end of their relationship far differently than she does. Inebriated as she is, Hannah catches the eye of Phil, a strapping young man who is only attending as a favor for his sick mother. And Vicki bonds with Bee’s uncle Joe, a successful, divorced businessman from Las Vegas with a thing for wistful young brunettes. Funny and sad with easily identifiable characters, Boston Globe advice columnist Goldstein’s debut makes the most of some very familiar scenarios. Charming wedding farce with a bit of depth.
Pub Date: April 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-452-29805-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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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