An intense story of one woman’s journey of self-discovery.
In this debut novel, a Brooklyn teacher and mom must find her inner strength after an ugly divorce, despite the growing threat of terrorist attacks against the French school where she works.
Tess Shapiro is a teacher at a school for French expatriates in Brooklyn’s hip Carroll Gardens neighborhood, the mother of two young children and a recent divorcée who is still struggling to navigate the messy aftermath of her failed marriage. Her ex-husband, Patrick, was an emotionless sociopath who cheated on Tess with numerous women, including prostitutes, and showed no remorse. Tess is glad to be rid of him, but it’s hard for her to heal from the hurt he caused. The only distraction she has from her problems is the comics she draws starring her glamorous spy alter ego, Andrea Chambers. But Tess begins to finally move on once she meets Guy, the sexy father of one of her students, who has moved to New York from Paris for only a year while he works for a game development company. Their feverishly romantic fling is a welcome distraction for Tess, especially when a neo-Nazi terrorist group known as NAFKA starts attacking French cultural centers around the world, and anti-French graffiti starts popping up at school. But tragedy brings Patrick’s presence back onto the center stage of Tess’ life, just as she starts to wonder whether Guy may not be what he seems. Egal has created a heartbreakingly relatable character in Tess, a woman who is smart in so many ways but naïve in so many others. Readers should certainly empathize with her battles to find herself amid the smoldering wreck of her marriage. Indeed, Tess’ struggle to deal with the fallout of her relationship with Patrick—not to mention her burgeoning feelings for Guy—creates enough drama on a personal level that the international intrigue of the NAFKA attacks feels unnecessary and oddly forced. The plot takes a weird turn that readers probably won’t expect, one that is welcome but awkward in execution.
An intense story of one woman’s journey of self-discovery.Pub Date: May 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-61927-8
Page Count: 166
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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