The glittery high-end fantasy is delivered with enough humor to leaven the silliness, making this a feel-good read.
When the exclusive life of blonde and beautiful Taylor Young starts to fall apart, her real character, forged by a tough childhood, comes out.
Taylor, her husband Nathan and their three perfect daughters occupy an upper-crust world. Among the perks for Taylor: lavish fashions (including $200 bras), sunny vacations and a Finnish nanny. But the pressure to stay on top in exclusive Bellevue, Wash., is almost too much. Between Taylor’s exercise classes, manicures, pedicures and a volunteer schedule that rivals a full-time job, she barely has a moment to relax poolside with a gin and tonic, not to mention keep up with her competitive book group. So when Nathan starts acting odd, disappearing for days on a business trip, she begins to worry. Could her perfect marriage, which rescued her from a working-class background, be going the way of her friend Lucy’s, broken up by an affair? The truth, when it comes out, is worse. Her billionaire husband has been fired, and he has been hiding the fact, letting compulsive-shopper Taylor ring up bills they can no longer afford. When Nathan attempts to move the family to Omaha, where he has found a job, Taylor refuses to go, trying to keep her place in a world she can no longer afford. Ultimately, she must choose between her family and her luxuries. The witty first-person narration keeps things lively in Potter’s latest (Odd Mom Out, 2007, etc.). Taylor’s neurotic fussiness provides both vicarious thrills and laughs before Taylor moves on to self awareness and a new kind of empowerment.
The glittery high-end fantasy is delivered with enough humor to leaven the silliness, making this a feel-good read.Pub Date: May 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-446-69924-2
Page Count: 420
Publisher: 5 Spot/Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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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