Packed with fun in every sentence, this book is the cure for your bad mood.
A very 21st-century wedding brings together a thoroughly modern cast of characters…and a nice, old-school gay book editor.
Whatever modern trend has got you down—political correctness, health and wellness, device madness, you name it—Rudnick skewers it in his latest comedy of manners. At its center is a lovely man named Rob who has recently lost his longtime partner to ALS. His best remaining friend is a personal trainer/action movie actor named Sean, whose flight attendant ex-wife, Linda, is about to marry a kinder, gentler Zuckerberg/Musk master-of-the-universe-type named Trone Meston, whose devices have completely taken over “life as we fucking know it,” which also happens to be the title of a debut novel Rob has just gotten fired over, thanks to a young “sensitivity associate” named Isabelle McNally. There are a slew of hilarious characters and connections, remarkably easy to keep straight once you’re into it but not to be further detailed here. The whole gang, it turns out, is headed to Maine for Trone and Linda’s wedding, which will also be the product reveal of the most revolutionary device Trone has ever introduced. A few examples of the bacchanalia that are Rudnick’s sentences: “Isabelle sexually experimented with a Filipina who identified as a warrior goddess, a queer man who taught her about weaving wildflower penis wreaths, and a three-person collective dedicated to having sex with food to vanquish the patriarchal miasma long associated with eclairs and body shaming.” Elsewhere: “As Linda told a friend, ‘It was like sex with the friendliest robot, that only wanted to make me come and then fill out a response card. It was great because it wasn’t really like sex, it was like—eating one of those astronaut meals from a sealed foil pouch and realizing it really did taste just like filet mignon.’” The sentences that aren’t about sex are just as good. With regard to the names Bridger and Morrow, the boy-and-girl twins of Sean and Linda: Their names “sounded like a wine cooler, a law firm on a soap opera, or animated bunnies in a Disney film.” It’s the little things and the big things. Rudnick kills.
Packed with fun in every sentence, this book is the cure for your bad mood.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781668068298
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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