A poignant tale of recrimination and forgiveness.
A man on the cusp of marriage to a woman of a mixed racial background struggles with his father’s bigotry and history in this novel.
Cary Hinton meets Cornelia Barber at Centenary College, where he teaches English literature, and eight months later they’re about to be married. On the day of their wedding, Cornelia is set to finally meet her new parents-in-law, but Cary anxiously frets about his father’s reaction to his fiancee’s mixed background: She’s a blend of Portuguese, Irish, Vietnamese, and African-American, and Cary’s father, Fletcher, is an unrepentant racist. Fletcher was once a highly decorated colonel in the Marines, but now he languishes in diminished form in a nursing home, addled with dementia but imperiously intimidating as ever. The meeting between Cornelia and Fletcher is predictably disastrous—he is monstrously insulting, an experience that dredges up both Cary’s old resentments and long-harbored guilt. Fletcher was a merciless martinet as a father and subjected Cary to withering discipline and criticism. Fletcher beat him badly once his abuse was discovered, an episode that forced the colonel into ignominious retirement. Cary joined the military as well—he was also a Marine and served in Beirut with distinction—but left with conflicted emotions, much to his father’s angrily expressed disappointment. Meanwhile, Fletcher is at the center of a controversy in the nursing home—he’s accused of striking his wife, Betsy, now frail in the wake of a stroke. Mustin (The One, 2018, etc.) paints a nuanced picture of racism that’s rich with layers—Fletcher served in Vietnam, only exacerbating the conflict with Cornelia, and Betsy actually has an Indian heritage. The author’s writing can be elegant, even poetic, and artfully captures the tenderness beneath Fletcher’s cantankerous surface: “He felt her hand on his forehead. Then he breathed deeply and found what he’d been seeking, the abyss of darkness beyond dreaming.” The novel’s ending may seem too neatly packaged for some, a trite conclusion incongruent with the complexity that precedes it. Otherwise, this is an intelligent story, carefully crafted.
A poignant tale of recrimination and forgiveness.Pub Date: March 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64255-688-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Gridley Fires Books
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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