Soap fans may savor the catfights and crass humor; others will probably find the narrative slack and pointless.
A hapless actress joins the snake pit cast of a popular American soap, in this sometimes amusing debut.
Having appeared on General Hospital and All My Children, Hughes has made a world she knows firsthand into the subject of a mild satire—not too daunting a task, considering that soaps satirize themselves five days a week. Hughes has British actress Kate McPhee going to work in Los Angeles on Live for Tomorrow just after discovering that her boyfriend has been sleeping with her best friend. Kate can’t ever quite get it together—she drives for six months with the donut on one of her car’s wheels. So she’s titmouse bait for the adders on the show, particularly Meredith Contini, the grand dame who has starred on Live longer than she’ll let any publicist admit. All Kate has to do is flirt mildly with one of the actors Meredith is sizing up and the newcomer finds her character morphing into a lesbian, who, down the line, will be pursued by vampires (don’t ask—Kate is Alice down the rabbit hole, as frequent and unnecessary quotes from the Carroll classic make clear). When she’s not skirmishing with Meredith, Kate tries without luck to jump-start her love life. A magician she meets at Starbucks pulls his own vanishing act. Shopping for a Christmas tree, she meets an aspiring screenwriter, but after a mellow holiday interlude, he leaves her. Love also seems to appear in the form of fellow actor Wyatt Sinclair, but Wyatt has the misfortune of being married to one of Kate’s best friends, also on the show. With her life (and the narrative) resembling the script of a soap (sans cliffhangers), Kate nobly turns away from Wyatt to face—yes, another day.
Soap fans may savor the catfights and crass humor; others will probably find the narrative slack and pointless.Pub Date: June 14, 2005
ISBN: 0-345-47082-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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
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
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PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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