A light tale of suburban warfare waged by the gardening elite.
A gardening competition leads to sounds of snipping in the backyard.
Blistering and broiling in a steam room someone forgot to properly calibrate, Jasper Burdick, owner of suburban Livia’s most prestigious garden center, dreams of a landscape bursting with enormous flowers of every ilk—all purchased at Burdick’s Plant World, of course—but each bloom has a human face. Burdick’s Best Yard Contest is born. Rumors of the competition and its prize money spread throughout Livia, a town riddled with more than its fair share of plant lovers. Draper carefully arranges his cast of loopy characters, turning the town of Livia into a living garden. Dr. Phyllis Sproot plays the villain. After completing a mail-order course from the Honey Larson-Bayles School of Agronomy, the previously merely pushy Sproot blooms into a domineering, manipulative know-it-all. Utterly cowed by Sproot’s expertise, Marta Poppendauber worries that her own gardens will fall short. Once Sproot hears about the contest, though, she abandons her vicious pruning of Marta’s gardens in favor of espionage. She sends Marta (in various ridiculous disguises) to snoop among the competitors’ plants, quickly discovering that the Fremonts are her natural enemies. Oblivious to Sproot’s villainous machinations, George and Nan Fremont have created a marvelous garden in their backyard, nearly bankrupting themselves in the process. Sproot is stunned to discover the Fremonts have defied all horticultural sanity by planting beautiful but hallucinogenic angel’s trumpets. Debut novelist Draper lavishly describes the gardens of Livia, lingering on begonias and lilacs, clematis and monarda, not to mention Sproot’s original blend of yuccas and a coreopsis-salvia-hollyhock blend. With so much detail, it’s sometimes hard to see the gardens for the plants, but the silly shenanigans keep the pace speedy.
A light tale of suburban warfare waged by the gardening elite.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61773-305-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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
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
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