A poignant story of loss, love and family.
Two people broken by World War I look to start over and take refuge in each other in this unique historical romance.
Williams’ debut tells the story of Francesca Sittoni, an Austrian turned Italian by the war, who immigrates to America with her husband, Cesare. He paid a dowry to Francesca’s father for the marriage, but he is unloving toward Francesca and her young daughter from her first marriage, Elena. When Cesare dies working in a coal mine, Francesca is understandably determined to stay in America since her family is too poor to care for her and Elena should they return to northern Italy. She answers an ad for a housekeeper on Kent Reed’s ranch in Willow Valley, Wyo. Despite Francesca’s pregnancy and child in tow, Kent agrees to hire her for one year, and he gets much more than he ever expected or wanted. As they raise Elena together amid hardships, they form a strong bond; affection inevitably develops between them. Francesca and Kent’s equally stubborn attitudes keep them apart romantically, even though they are forced to live in close quarters in the small house they share. The characters come from extremely different backgrounds, but as Williams skillfully weaves their lives together, they begin to see that they have much more in common than they originally believed. Kent is resistant to officially making Francesca and Elena his family; he feels unworthy and has struggled with emasculation after he was wounded in the war and his wife left him. Francesca thinks Kent only sees her as a live-in maid and cook—a poor Tyrolean woman set in the ways of the old country. It takes the neighbors’ help for them to see the life they have already created together and how much they care for one another. Williams writes with familiarity, easily transporting the reader back to the 1920s. Despite the technological, economical and social differences between then and now, the heart of the story is timeless. Beautiful imagery accentuates the compelling narrative that depicts an era gone but not forgotten.
A poignant story of loss, love and family.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0982557419
Page Count: 162
Publisher: Jargon Media
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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