Leap Year: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: a witty yet warm trip back to the 80's
Review: A new (yet old) book by Peter Cameron! What a pleasant surprise. He wrote Leap Year in the 1980's for the short-lived NYC weekly "7-days." The novel reads quickly but has all the compassion and intelligence of his other works. These are characters that you will not soon forget.

Rating:
Summary: A witty and compassionate first novel of 1988 NYC circles
Review: I wanted to read the book a chapter at a time, the way it originally appeared, but I could not. I gulped it all down in two sittings. (It's not my fault: it's not only wise and funny but definitely a "page-turner.") Most of the characters ultimately prove to be better than they seemed. As in his later books, Cameron creates a range of interesting characters (female and male, gay and straight). That he can make New Yorkers sympathetic shows either great imagination or great skill! I even felt some sympathy for the unredeemed villainess and the two weak men she used in nefarious plots.

Like Armistead Maupin's tales of an interlinked but diverse cast of mostly young San Franciscans a decade earlier, Cameron's tales of New Yorkers in their early 30s are not sexually graphic. There are a few hints, but mostly it is relationships and love, not sex, that is his subject. Drugs are also invisible.

A lot happens to Cameron's characters and I was sorry to leave them behind when I reached the end.

Rating:
Summary: Warm and entertaining.
Review: Leap Year is an amusement designed to be entertaining, and it most definitely is. It is a warm, occasionally funny book. While it makes use of plot contrivances and some stock characters, its main players stay in character, and transcend the "amusement" genre to some extent.