A lively but somewhat pat bundle of fictive life lessons.
Face your fears, follow your dreams and say hello to that gorgeous hunk—that’s the message from this feisty collection of motivational verse and short stories.
Recalling her own struggles with depression, the author of this energetic medley encourages readers to get out of their shells, take charge of their lives and believe in themselves despite reverses and naysayers. The first section consists of poems aimed at stimulating the will to succeed, written in the exhortatory tone—“Do you want to be / a flash in the pan or the cream of the crop? / What will it take to get you to grab the bull by the horns?”—of an exuberant life coach with a weakness for mixed metaphors. The bulk of the book consists of Rabello’s short stories, which wrap self-help sermonizing in florid romance. Most of her tales center on shy, insecure, lovelorn women with extravagant hopes that they despair of achieving; their task is to learn to seize happiness by both lapels when it shows up—usually in the form of men dripping with wealth, looks and sensitivity. (The man’s complementary task is apparently to instantly fall in love with the heroine.) Sudden, charged encounters drive the narratives: A cleaning woman spends a passionate night with a psychiatrist then wonders if she should pursue a commitment; a career girl meets a studly ghost in need of help; an aspiring writer weathers a scathing critique from a hotshot editor whose caustic manner masks his own vulnerabilities; a volunteer at a feel-good telephone chat line wins a businessman’s heart by helping him with his ethical quandaries. The stories depict a dance of attraction and anxious hesitancy, with lots of testy and flirty banter thrown in: “I’m interested in your expertise. The fact that you’re an exquisite mulata is icing on the cake.” Rabello writes in a fluent style, but her plots often feel contrived, and the dialogue sometimes lapses into motivational volleys. (She: “Let’s both use our pain as energy—as fuel for the fight.” He: “Don’t let the things you don’t have prevent you from using the things you do have.”) Still, readers looking for a shot of gumption may get swept off their feet by these whirlwind redemptions.
A lively but somewhat pat bundle of fictive life lessons.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-1483980393
Page Count: 234
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Short and sweet; stuffed with emotion and original ideas.
Bordallo (An Autobiography of an Afternoon, 2012) delivers romantic philosophy via an enchanting collection of poems and scenes.
Bordallo shows a fresh perspective on love and the struggles of humanity. His lilting tones induce the sensation of falling in love. The collection comprises three parts that take the reader on a date with two unnamed, would-be lovers. The characters share a philosophical conversation over a bottle of wine. When the woman asks, “What are you looking for?” the answer is thought-provoking and unconventional. The second part features a couple on the beach and another intimate conversation. The dialogue is equally pensive, and sometimes self-congratulatory, about seeing frustration as positive, even when left with empty arms. Scenes brim with vivid descriptions that describe the world through a different lens, giving the reader “gardens of sand” and a yellow sky at sunrise. Interspersed among the chatty date scenes are bits of poetry, meditations on romance, the moon, the feel of a kiss. The lyrical work dances on the page, although the images do not always succeed. Comparing eating a mango with making love feels amateurish, creating a disturbing bump in an otherwise romantic ride. An energetic tone replaces the intimate conversations in the final part of the book, as two friends vacation in Brazil and stop at a bar. Secondary characters get swept into each other on the dance floor. They may have fallen in love, if only for a moment. It’s a tale of savoring minutes and making the most of the days—both for lovers and friends.
Short and sweet; stuffed with emotion and original ideas.Pub Date: May 29, 2012
ISBN: 978-1475130140
Page Count: 94
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An engrossing coming-of-age story that wrings hard-won wisdom from giddy romance.
In her memoir, Scolnik recounts a passionate affair, tested by separation, with a Frenchman.
Scolnik’s narrative begins in 1976 when the 20-year-old Wesleyan student arrived in Paris for a junior year abroad to study flute, French literature, Marxist “Dialectic Thought,” etc. Entranced by Parisian culture but feeling lonely and adrift, she signed up with the amateur chorus of the Orchestre de Paris, where, scanning the bass section, she beheld Luc, an “Adonis-like man” with “a sensitive face radiating quiet intelligence.” After days of gazing, she finally tapped him on the shoulder. Through awkward small talk, car rides, and cafe meetups with the reserved tax lawyer, the two bonded over classical music and succumbed to a torrent of love, sex that felt “deeply metaphysical,” and languorous idylls in her garret. Alas, their love seemed doomed. Luc was married with a 3-year-old son, but, he assured Scolnik, he was separated from his wife, Claire (much of the time, at least), and would divorce her and go to America to work, perhaps. Returning to New England and Wesleyan, Scolnik continued to hope, encouraged by Luc’s besotted letters and a three-week reprise of the affair during her spring break trip to Paris. When Luc announced that he would come to Boston for a summer English course, she rented them an apartment to live in together—and that’s when her blazing ardor got plunged into an ice bath. Luc arrived grumpy and distracted, hated every morsel of American food, and made plain his indifference to Scolnik, even scoffing at her when she badly cut herself. After five days of this treatment, Scolnik “despised him with every cell in [her] body” and left him. She then rushed back a few weeks later to see him—only to be confronted by Claire herself.
Scolnik’s saga is, in part, a burning love letter to Paris, written with gorgeous detail. In cafes, she writes, she “began to recognize certain types—elderly French ladies sitting shoulder to shoulder looking out onto the street, their miniature terriers perched on chairs beside them; businessmen in suits nursing tall beers; students smoking cigarettes and writing notes at their espresso-cluttered tables; graying, long-haired intellectuals with scarves, looking important, retired, and committed to café life as a means of keeping the old political discussions alive over their plats du jour.” Concerning her fraught relationship with Luc, she conveys the visceral impact of the couple’s attraction (“it was like touching a power line,” she writes, when her finger accidentally grazed his hand during a concert), while its obsessiveness comes through in excerpts from Luc’s hammy but heartfelt missives. (“My body was knotted, as if, at 1:30 when your plane took off, all the existential anguish that you knew how to appease, surprised me again with more force, more tenacity. Paris seems absurd.”) Scolnik’s shrewd, evocative prose captures the bliss of love, but she’s also entertainingly cleareyed about its petty agonies when it unravels. (“Although I knew that none of our daily trials were my fault, Luc made me feel responsible for them all: that the bus ride into Cambridge was long and hot, that good art films weren’t showing at the right times, that a dead fish was floating in the Boston Harbor, that inexpensive little bistros weren’t materializing when we were hungry.”) The result is a captivating remembrance that treats falling in love and falling out of it with equal honesty.
An engrossing coming-of-age story that wrings hard-won wisdom from giddy romance.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64663-471-2
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
