An inventive love story full of curious twists and turns.
From author Kobasic (Angels in Stone, 2012) comes an urban fantasy about conjoined twins and their search for love.
Jade and Scarlett lead far from typical lives. Joined literally at the hip, the two are independent from the waist up; however, they must function as a single person from the waist down. Having written an inspirational best-seller about their trials and tribulations, the two live a relatively comfortable, albeit romantically void, existence. But when the mysterious, highly successful magician Sebastian Cole meets them, their lives change. Smitten with Scarlett, Sebastian introduces the girls to his world of SRO Las Vegas shows, fine dining, and an assortment of assistants, admirers and important friends. The talented, seductive Sebastian is more than just a common illusionist; his own story involves the supernatural and a connection to a powerful group known as Lucifer’s Chosen. As the three become intertwined, the reader follows along on a subsequently bizarre love story full of reincarnation, diabolical figures and the roaring club culture of present-day Las Vegas. Creative in concept, the novel ably depicts the inherent difficulty of romantic love for conjoined twins. Sexual at times (“Wetness pooled in me as his hand inched closer”), the plot sometimes stalls with frequent descriptions of hairstyles, clothing and food (such as when Sebastian cheerfully acknowledges his involvement in the making of a dessert: “I had a hand in the recipe; we roast the pecans in honey and brown sugar. A little rum too”). Still, the novel, the first in a projected series, succeeds in creating a believably fantastic situation, and the main characters’ unusual back stories make for intriguing urban-fantasy characters.
An inventive love story full of curious twists and turns.Pub Date: July 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9881554-2-8
Page Count: 415
Publisher: Stone Series Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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