Fielding brings back beloved single lady Bridget Jones (Bridget Jones’s Diary, 1998; Bridget Jones: the Edge of Reason, 2000).
The last time readers met Bridget she was on her way to a happily ever after with mild-mannered English barrister Mark Darcy. In this third installment, Bridget is once again looking for romance. She is now 51 and the mother of two young children, Billy and Mabel, from her relationship with Mark. (The fate of Bridget’s union with Mark is covered early on.) The opening pages find Bridget fretting about her new man, Roxby McDuff (yes, folks, that is his real name; sorry, Mr. Darcy). Roxster, as he’s called, is 20 years Bridget’s junior. She met him on Twitter. This “toyboy” is fun and flirty, but is he someone who can commit long term? The book considers the role of social media and mobile devices in modern dating, a time in which murky texts stand in place of phone calls and, well, actual dating. It’s here that Fielding is at her sharpest, with Bridget at one point boasting that she “lost 2lbs through texting thumb-action.” Any action, it seems, is better than none. The book also examines the pitfalls of dating later in life. Should you admit to your younger boyfriend that you can’t read the fine print on a menu card without pulling out reading glasses? And how many fart jokes need to be exchanged before you begin to suspect that your younger man is immature? Along the way, Bridget’s friends from the previous books resurface, not to mention a certain lecherous ex-boss, Daniel Cleaver, these days more vulnerable and lost. There are laugh-out-loud moments throughout: Bridget would not be Bridget if she didn’t have a makeup mishap (she accidentally applies mascara to her upper lip before a date) and yo-yoing weight issues (she admits herself into an obesity clinic; it doesn’t go well). But the writing is also characterized by a certain sadness as Fielding touches on loss and mortality and the passage of time. The ending feels rushed and many will wish Fielding had devoted more space to developing various romantic matters leading up to it. But one thing is certain: Bridget hasn’t given up on love. Nor should she. At any age. Not as rich as Fielding’s first two Bridget Jones books. Bridget’s fans will want it anyway. When Fielding is funny, she’s very funny.
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-385-35086-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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