A powerful, emotionally textured winner.
A divorced wedding-dress designer tries to extricate herself from her ex-husband’s new life by moving from Manhattan to her suburban hometown, just in time to see her sister’s marriage rocked by a sexually graphic text.
Ever since Jenny’s husband, Owen, suddenly decided he didn’t love her anymore, she’s felt a little unmoored, especially since he hasn’t actually walked out of her life but only moved her to the best friend column. Confusingly, he's also acquired a new wife who adores Jenny, and they're having a baby, which Jenny desperately wanted to do but Owen was never ready for. Moving back to her hometown, the charming New York suburb of Cambry-on-Hudson, takes her back to her roots and closer to her family, since her mother and sister still live there. She’s excited to start her new life, separate from Owen and with an elegant storefront and workshop where she can design and create her signature wedding dresses. But as soon as she arrives, her sister, Rachel, discovers a sext on her husband’s phone, which puts her previously idyllic marriage in jeopardy. Rachel has never wanted anything but to be married with children, and her beautiful triplets, handsome husband, and stay-at-home life are the culmination of her lifelong dreams. But when it looks like Adam is cheating, her world is rocked. At first invested in saving the marriage, Rachel begins to resent Adam’s long-suffering attitude when she doesn’t forgive him—and get over it—right away, especially when it becomes clear that she can’t trust him anymore. Jenny and Rachel must navigate their conflicted emotions and search their hearts to decide what they really want when their expected futures go off the rails. Romance star Higgins shifts smoothly and poignantly into women’s fiction with this emotionally compelling story, and she brings her ability to create affecting heroines to this new genre. With a secondary cast of characters who buoy an already perceptive study of love, marriage, sisterhood, and loyalty, Higgins delivers.
A powerful, emotionally textured winner.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-373-78497-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harlequin
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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