In her first novel, playwright and screenwriter Theresa Rebeck skewers paparazzi culture and our national obsession with the hookups and breakdowns of the young and the beautiful.
In Three Girls and Their Brother (Shaye Areheart Books, 337 pages, $23.95), three gorgeous redheads are thrown into the celebrity machine when a famous photographer takes their portrait for The New Yorker magazine. The media attention sparked by the photograph becomes a firestorm after a public run-in between rebellious, 14-year-old Amelia and a lecherous movie star.
Suddenly, the Heller sisters are New York City’s ‘‘It girls’’ of the moment, their every move stalked and scrutinized by legions of paparazzi and press.
Ambitious 18-year-old Daria and wild 17-year-old Polly welcome the attention, but Amelia wants to go back to the real world of high school. But she soon discovers that casting off her celebrity status won’t be as easy as it seems.
It doesn’t help that the girls’ mother, a former beauty queen, is willing to sacrifice her daughters to feed the demands of agents, publicists, stylists and reporters.
‘‘Honestly, it was like being in some crazy prison somewhere,’’ Amelia says after a nasty encounter with a manipulative agent. ‘‘Psycho prison for teenage models, that’s what it was like.’’
Is it twice as nice when twins write a novel together? Here's a review of Turning Tables:
By MALCOLM RITTER
This novel will give you a new appreciation for what waiters and waitresses at fancy restaurants go through. And even if you don’t eat at fancy restaurants, you’ll be rewarded with a delightful story.
Turning Tables (Dial Press, 324 pages, $24) is written by identical twins Heather and Rose MacDowell, who drew on their own experience as waitresses at restaurants in New York City, Nantucket, Mass., and San Francisco. They’ve distilled those memories into the story of Erin Edwards, 28, who loses her corporate job in a downsizing.
Desperate for cash, she takes a waitressing job at a chic Manhattan restaurant. Disasters ensue.
She has zero experience, and it shows in this high-pressure environment, ruled by her demanding and sharp sharp-tongued bosses. Early on, she’s flummoxed by the finer points of folding napkins at high speed, and sent sprawling in front of the temperamental head chef because her shoes weren’t designed for greasy spots.
Then there’s tackling the psychological challenge of reading and pleasing the high-roller clientele. ‘‘You have to be part of their fantasy,’’ her sympathetic mentor explains. ‘‘It’s all about controlling the guest’s experience, and that means adapting to every table. When I’m talking to guests, I’m not me any more. I’m ... whoever they want me to be.’’
Frankly, she’s told, none of her peers on the staff expected her to last more than a week. But she’s determined not to give in. She plunges on through traumas such as dealing with a shrieking child in the hushed dining room and waiting on a powerful restaurant critic. Throw in romances with a cook and a well-to-do customer — who furnishes a humiliating reminder of a waitresses’ social standing among his peers — and there’s more than enough to keep this story humming.
And it does. Surely there’s a movie in such a feel-good tale with outsized personalities, high-pressure action and an attractive young heroine. Until somebody makes it, the book will surely satisfy your appetite for a good tale.
Murder, medicine and forensic investigation collide in Lawrence Goldstone's fiction debut, The Anatomy of Deception (Delacorte, 340 pages, $24), which takes place in Philadelphia in the late 1800s, around the time autopsies were just becoming a legal practice.
The first paragraph sets the scene:
March 14, 1889
For days, clouds had hung over the frigid city, promising snow, an ephemeral late winter veneer of white, but the temperature had suddenly risen and a cold, stringing drizzle had arrived instead. Jostled along in the derelict hansom, clad in her maid's blue worsted dress and plain wool cloak, her fingers and feet felt bloodless. The gloom that hung over the river penetrated the thin walls of the coach until it seemed as though she were breathing it.
Publisher's Weekly says: "With this top-notch historical page-turner and his proven versatility in nonfiction, Goldstone can expect to win over many new fans."
It's February, which means Black History Month, Lincoln's birthday, Washington's birthday and, of course, Valentine's Day. We'll cover all of these on the blog throughout the month. First up is a collection of stories compiled by Jeffrey Eugenides — a former Oprah Book Club author for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Middlesex.
My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead (HarperCollins, 587 pages, $24.95) features love stories from writers past and present, including Vladimir Nabokov, Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, William Faulkner, Lorrie Moore, Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, Denis Johnson, Stuart Dybek and many more.
The coolest thing about this book is that, according to Amazon.com, all proceeds from this book will go directly to fund the free youth writing programs offered by 826 Chicago, which is part of the network of writing centers across the United States dedicated to supporting students with their writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write.
Here's a review of the book from the Associated Press...
Thomas Kinkade is best known as the "painter of light." Art snobs will tell you he's a hack and a sellout but his popularity cannot be denied as he is reportedly the most-collected living artist in America.
I am not a Kinkade collector but I won't dismiss his appeal. His paintings have a Norman Rockwell-like charm, with simple hometown themes, and his depiction of light is undeniably cool.
The artist also has been writing books for some years now, with Katherine Spencer. They continue the Cape Light series with their eighth installment, A Christmas Visitor (Berkley, 249 pages, $23.95)...
I chose today's book, Love Falls (HarperCollins, 304 pages, $13.95), because I was intrigued that the author, Esther Freud, is Sigmund Freud's great-granddaughter; also because the main character, Lara Riley, is of my era.
Lara is 17 in the summer of 1981, when Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer. I was also a teenager that summer — but that's where the similarities end. I, for example, am not British and was not whisked off to Italy by my reclusive father to spend the summer at a Tuscan estate, where I then spent my days adventuring with the Willoughbys next door and falling in love with the family heir, Kip.
What could be worse than losing your job right before Christmas? How about knowing you're losing your job and then having to suck it up and work one last night serving holiday shoppers and partygoers as they celebrate what should be a joyous time of year.
That's the dilemma facing Red Lobster manager Manny as he must try to remain positive for the employees in Last Night at the Lobster (Viking Penguin, 146 pages, $19.95) by Stewart O’Nan...
Before I was even halfway into the book, I knew I wanted to see Chris Elliott's Into Hot Air: Mounting Mount Everest (Weinstein Books, 342 pages, $23.95) made into a movie.
Funnyman Elliott made a name for himself hiding under the stairs on David Letterman's "Late Show," and then as a 30-year-old paperboy who still lives with his parents in the vastly underrated and underseen sitcom "Get a Life."
Now he's gone and written another "novel." His first, The Shroud of the Thwacker (2005), was a parody of historical crime fiction. Into Hot Air sends up survival stories (like Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air), disaster movies, celebrity activism and reality TV...
Have you ever been mistaken for a celebrity all your life and then had the chance to meet that celebrity face to face?
No? OK, i'ts never happened to me, either, but it happens to Ray Johnston in Steve Carlson's intriguing novel, Almost Graceland (St. Martin's, 263 pages, $23.95)...
Jim Lehrer of PBS's "The News Hour With Jim Lehrer" has written his 17th novel, none of which have been read by me. The latest, Eureka (Random House, 240 pages, $24.95), has been sitting on my desk for a couple months — a couple of months where I've looked at it every other day, thought about reading it and put it off.
I'm two and a half chapters in and — what do you know — I like it...
We finally get to a best-seller on the blog. John Grisham, known the world over for his courtroom thrillers, takes a U-turn of sorts this time around and writes about football and Italy. I have not read the book but I recently gave a copy — a birthday gift — to my father, a longtime Grisham fan and even longer football fan and, of course, he's been Italian all his life. Here's a review from the Associated Press:
BY SARA ROSE
John Grisham’s newest novel, Playing for Pizza, (Doubleday, 258 pages, $21.95) is definitely not what you would expect from the master of courtroom suspense. Grisham leaves the lawyers and intrigue behind and instead focuses on football. American football. In Italy...
Despite British bookmakers making the race between Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach and Lloyd Jones' Miister Pip, Anne Enright has emerged victorious — unanimously — to win the 2007 Man Booker Prize for her fourth novel, The Gathering (272 pages, $14), published in the United States in September by Black Cat, a paperback original imprint of Grove Press...
Dysfunctional families always make for a good story. In Eliot Schrefer's follow-up to his 2006 debut, Glamorous Disasters, the author mines similar themes having to do with the upper and lower classes.
In The New Kid (Simon & Schuster, 288 pages, $25), Humphrey and Gretchen are half-siblings who share the same mother...
Do you love medical shows? Personally I've been hooked on "CSI" reruns for a couple of months. The procedurals can get a little boring, however, without the mix of human interaction and emotional attachments to keep us coming back. Thankfully, shows like "Grey's Anatomy" and "ER" fill that bill and more, as the human element is always front and center.
Much the same could be said for Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures (Weinstein Books, 352 pages, $23.95) by first-time author Vincent Lam, who mined his own experiences as a doctor to write these heartfelt, interweaving stories...
Remember Robby Benson? He of the big, blue eyes, baby-smooth skin and sensitive voice? He of the big screen tear-jerkers "Ice Castles," "One on One," "Ode to Billy Joe" ... TV's "The Death of Richie," anyone?
Benson disappeared from the public eye after a while and spent most of his post-Tiger Beat years behind the camera, doing voiceover work and directing sitcoms. Now he's gone and written a novel, Who Stole the Funny? (Harper Entertainment, 349 pages, $13.95) ...
