Rife with female frivolity, punchy one-liners, and sex. Margolis (Apocalipstick, 2003, etc.) is at her best when she veers...
Love conquers all, though you’ll wish it wouldn’t.
Stephanie Glassman is a single mother working a scraped-together string of part-time jobs while feeling guilty about leaving Jake, her increasingly bratty toddler, at home with an indulgent nanny. Stephanie is a talented singer who has all but given up on her dream of a musical career when she runs into her old crush Frank, who comes complete with fame, good looks, and the irksome incompatible fiancée. His presence at one of Stephanie’s small singing gigs makes her day. Meanwhile, friends encourage Stephanie to send CDs out to agents, and Jake’s father, Albert, pops in for the holidays with Sunnie, his stereotypically ditzy girlfriend. We learn that though Albert is a self-centered womanizer, he genuinely cares for his child and strives to be a good father. When Sunnie finds herself pursuing an old flame, Stephanie and Albert succumb again to their physical attraction, and Albert even spits out the idea of marriage and their possible future as a happy family. The story lags as Stephanie repeatedly runs into Frank (newly single), and discusses her love-life options with friend Lizzie (the unappreciated wife and mother) and Cass (the fun-lovin’ single girl). Eventually, Stephanie gets that big call from an agent. Thinking that she may land the lead in a musical, she finds herself congratulated by her squealing friends, family, and Frank, but, alas, not by Albert. She’s disappointed to learn that her supposed break involves providing vocals for a lip-synching Hollywood diva named Katherine Martinez (wittily tagged “K-Mart”). So Stephanie makes a series of questionable choices, driven by her need to make a living and her concern for her son. A subplot involving Lizzie and her cheating husband has an unnecessarily tidy ending, as does our main story.
Rife with female frivolity, punchy one-liners, and sex. Margolis (Apocalipstick, 2003, etc.) is at her best when she veers from the shenanigans and lets us glimpse our heroine in her poignant everyday struggles.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-33733-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Delta
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
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