Strained, generally unfunny farce with more than a whiff of Benny Hill–style sniggering and contrivance.
Giddy girlfriends, in a US debut by Scottish author Low.
Mind you, Jess Latham is much more serious than her mates, though she looks something like believable-bombshell Jennifer Aniston. Glaswegian Jess, a House of Commons researcher, is a career-minded assistant to a distinguished politician and carries a real briefcase. If the Right Honorable Basil Asquith, MP, says he’s unhappily married to a 50-ish bitch of impeccable breeding, naive Jess believes him. If he asks Jess to cuff him and tickle him with a feather duster, well—why not? Surely he’ll divorce his wife someday and then marry her. But Jess is heartbroken (somewhat) when she walks in on Basil and blond, firm-breasted Mrs. Asquith playing wicked little games of their own. At least Basil wasn’t lying about the impeccable breeding: Jess accepts her rival’s offer of tea and cookies afterward and marvels at Mrs. Asquith’s icy aplomb. Gosh, it’s something new to shriek about over endless drinks on girls’ night out. Shagging emotionally unavailable men is de rigueur among her fabulous friends. But things are changing: sexy, impulsive Carly, the proud possessor of 47 credit cards, has decided to marry somebody—anybody—and is globetrotting to look up her old boyfriends. Kate, wife of a noted architect and mother of three, is restlessly eying a studly building contractor, though Carol, a “hilariously shallow” supermodel and mother of twins, married to another model who looks like Brad Pitt, seems content enough. As is Sarah, an elementary schoolteacher rescued from impoverished singlehood by lovely Nick. Back to Jess: Is her rebound romance with sexy tabloid reporter Mike Chapman the real thing? Or does Mike just want to get a lurid scoop on Basil? Will Carly’s old boyfriend, now gay, catch both men in flagrante delicto at a drag ball? Gosh, Jess is pregnant! Looks like she’s going to give birth on the back of a cute pink moped!
Strained, generally unfunny farce with more than a whiff of Benny Hill–style sniggering and contrivance.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7434-8312-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Downtown Press/Pocket
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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