Overview
Wholly contemporary and compulsively readable, this sparkling debut is a finely honed tale of sex, love, and making movies that is sure to appeal to fans of Nick Hornby and Melissa Bank.
Sparkle Life is about the movie business, sex, globalization, and real estate as told through the lives of three women in their 30s—Liv, Joy, and Sara. Liv is rich, talented, and promiscuous, tremendously attached to the men who raised her: her father, a very religious clothing manufacturer and her uncle, a Park Avenue psychiatrist. Joy makes lists: be a producer, married, and rich. Sara is extraordinarily observant, seeing details and identifying patterns, including her own inability to explain what the patterns mean.
Kara Lindstrom masterfully portrays a world where glitz, ambition, and sex are exposed to the seams. Yet, when her characters catch themselves in the compromises they live by, this racy tale is transformed into an incisive meditation on the challenges of everyday life.
“What a dazzler of a book! A group of interconnected and indelibly complex characters, all swirling around the maelstrom of the movies and the affairs of the heart, told in prose that snaps and glints and virtually sets off sparks. Lindstrom's going places and I'm buying a map because after this book, I’d follow her anywhere.”
—Caroline Leavitt, author of Girls in Trouble and Coming Back to Me
“Sparkle Life is exactly what a contemporary novel ought to be: sharp, funny, sad, and true. Lindstrom writes with a lucid asperity that suggests a Mary McCarthy narrator trapped in a Don DeLillo world.”
—Rachel Cline, author of What to Keep
Synopsis
Wholly contemporary and compulsively readable, this sparkling debut is a finely honed tale of sex, love, and making movies that is sure to appeal to fans of Nick Hornby and Melissa Bank.
Sparkle Life is about the movie business, sex, globalization, and real estate as told through the lives of three women in their 30s—Liv, Joy, and Sara. Liv is rich, talented, and promiscuous, tremendously attached to the men who raised her: her father, a very religious clothing manufacturer and her uncle, a Park Avenue psychiatrist. Joy makes lists: be a producer, married, and rich. Sara is extraordinarily observant, seeing details and identifying patterns, including her own inability to explain what the patterns mean.
Kara Lindstrom masterfully portrays a world where glitz, ambition, and sex are exposed to the seams. Yet, when her characters catch themselves in the compromises they live by, this racy tale is transformed into an incisive meditation on the challenges of everyday life.
“What a dazzler of a book! A group of interconnected and indelibly complex characters, all swirling around the maelstrom of the movies and the affairs of the heart, told in prose that snaps and glints and virtually sets off sparks. Lindstrom's going places and I'm buying a map because after this book, I’d follow her anywhere.”
—Caroline Leavitt, author of Girls in Trouble and Coming Back to Me
“Sparkle Life is exactly what a contemporary novel ought to be: sharp, funny, sad, and true. Lindstrom writes with a lucid asperity that suggests a Mary McCarthy narrator trapped in a Don DeLillo world.”
—Rachel Cline, author of What to Keep
Publishers Weekly
The three 30-something stars of this ambitious debut are not friends but New York film world acquaintances at one degree of separation. Joy and Sara see the same psychiatrist, who turns out to be Liv's uncle. Liv is dating Sara's brother who cheats on her with Joy. And not far into the book, all three seal their romantic fates at the same movie premier party. The coincidences that bring them together drive their lives-yielding epiphanies, movie deals and weddings-but never bring them closer emotionally. Lindstrom is a Hollywood veteran and has production design credits on films from the cult classic Heathers to the Oscar-nominated The Mambo Kings. As her cast drifts apart through the second half of her narrative, Joy and Sara are feeling alone in new marriages, while Liv is still single but on improved terms with herself: she's found the peace that might one day let her find love. Readers who like a Sex and the City milieu but don't need their stories tied up with a bow on top will enjoy meeting this crowd. (May) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.