Unassuming yet powerhouse attorney Jennifer Walters and her secret alter ego, the publicity-loving She-Hulk, must learn to coexist and balance their physical and intellectual skills while fighting crime and injustice in the courtroom and on the streets, and possibly reclaiming the love of Jennifer’s life.
On the first day of the year, Jennifer prepares a list of Valentine’s Day Resolutions (New Year’s Resolutions being too cliché and statistically difficult) in order to conquer the fact that she has no job, no home and is persona non grata within her Avengers community, thanks to raucous She-Hulk. As a world-class attorney, she finds a job pretty quickly, taking on an inventor who’s allegedly created a faulty product that is killing people. Unfortunately, the senior partner of her new firm is the father of Ellis, the man Jennifer hooked up with years ago and has never forgotten; and the man accused of unleashing the faulty product is Ellis’ best friend. If that isn’t enough, Jennifer is supposed to submit to counseling when it’s She-Hulk who has the problem, and who has time for that when she’s litigating a high-profile case with her brand new job? Oh, and one of the attorneys she’s supposed to be working with is Ellis’ cold witch of a fiancee. Publisher Hyperion is staking a claim on a comic book–romance crossover market with popular Marvel characters, and She-Hulk (along with X-Men’s Rogue) is their first attempt to capture a comic-book sensibility in fiction form with a major romantic arc. Acosta has created an interesting and intriguing character study of the seemingly mismatched Jennifer and She-Hulk and has introduced a powerful past-love romantic storyline that somehow makes sense for both sides of the personality equation. It’s not clear how close to traditional canon the characters are and, therefore, how the purists of the comic-book universe will feel, but despite a few annoyances in the storyline (e.g. why would you not make a second call to the man you’re madly in love with?), it’s an engaging success.
A fun, escapist romantic romp with superheroes—who can resist?
Pub Date: June 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4013-1101-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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