Another giddy ride, with no end in sight.
Plucky über-consumer Rebecca Brandon has her work cut out for her as mum to tiny terror Minnie.
With a job she loves (personal shopper, natch), happy marriage and an adorable little daughter, Becky Brandon certainly seems to have it all. Sure, two-year-old Minnie is a bit of a handful. Her spirited behavior gets them banned from various shopping malls. And Becky’s PR whiz hubby Luke might be a tad overworked and distracted. But things are generally good, until the global financial crisis has to come along and really put a damper on Becky’s lifestyle. So as a money-saving concession to her husband, she agrees to stop shopping until she has worn everything in her wardrobe at least three times. Torture! She also throws herself into a new project—planning an over-the-top surprise birthday party for Luke. With visions of fire-eaters, jugglers and a live band, it is clear that Becky’s desires don’t mesh with financial reality. But when has that ever stopped her? She enlists Luke’s trusted assistant Bonnie into her schemes, and tries to “barter” party supplies for slightly used Marc Jacobs bags. Meanwhile, she sees an opportunity at work and starts to offer a “discreet” shopping service for her wealthy clients, where she disguises their purchases in computer paper boxes. It is a big hit, although she neglects to tell her bosses about the subterfuge. And then Luke’s estranged mother, the imperious (and fabulously rich) Elinor, reappears and wants to have a relationship with her granddaughter. The two meet, but well-meaning Becky cannot tell Luke about this, adding to all the many things she is keeping from him. But he has a few secrets as well, and getting him to his own party will take all of Becky’s considerable skills. Chock-full of the kind of sitcom shenanigans Kinsella’s fans expect, this latest in the series (Shopaholic & Baby, 2007, etc.) keeps the silly plot moving along. A little more growth from her iconic heroine, though, might have won over new readers as well.
Another giddy ride, with no end in sight.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-34204-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
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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