Thanks to Strohmeyer’s penchant for humor, Kat’s adventures entertain despite the transparently contrived plot.
A spendthrift interior designer, fearing that her economist husband plans to divorce and impoverish her, joins a support group of eccentric skinflints, in the latest from Strohmeyer (Sweet Love, 2008, etc.).
Without regrets, Kat jilted fiancé Liam, now a billionaire big-pharma exec, for her soul mate, Griff, a charismatic economics professor at a small New Jersey college. Twenty years later, daughter Laura is finishing high school, and Griff and Kat, always strapped for cash, are worrying about how to put her through NYU. A long-term factotum for Chloe, a social-climbing designer, Kat yearns to go independent, if only her paycheck weren’t already dedicated to paying off her ever-ballooning credit-card debt. She rationalizes her mall habit, Lexus SUV and daily venti lattes by arguing that interior designers have to ape their wealthy clients. When she discovers condom wrappers while laundering Griff’s pants, her busybody sister Viv goads her to investigate further. There’s a fancy restaurant bill, unusual for famously frugal Griff. Is he wining and dining his young, sexy assistant Bree? Griff has a secret MasterCard, and he has somehow diverted $10,000 to a separate bank account. Kat’s denial evaporates when she finds e-mail exchanges between Bree and Griff indicating that he is going to “break it to” Kat when Laura graduates high school. Kat has about seven months to amass a divorce contingency fund of $15,000. Enter the Penny Pinchers Club, endearingly fanatical misfits who introduce Kat to the secrets of samurai saving, e.g. swarm en masse in search of discounts and rebates, buy in bulk and freeze, etc. Kat is arrested while dumpster-diving with “freegan” former investment banker Wade. Griff and Bree are increasingly closeted, allegedly researching his book about a reclusive ex-Fed chairman. Liam resurfaces, seeking a designer to refurbish his new mansion. As Liam, still smitten, offers her a safe harbor, Kat is increasingly tempted to question the choice she made years before between financial security and the love of her life.
Thanks to Strohmeyer’s penchant for humor, Kat’s adventures entertain despite the transparently contrived plot.Pub Date: July 2, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-525-95117-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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