A meandering story, though funny enough in a blasé way, featuring sly asides on everything from the perfidy of men to the...
Love and a nice apartment are hard to find in Manhattan, says this second novel by the author of Going Down (1996).
The daughter of a rich fashion designer, Liv Kellerman never had to work a day in her life—until she left her lawyer husband when he started taking Prozac and stopped having sex with her. Problem is, he owns their apartment. Liv takes a job reading to a blind judge, but she can’t afford the cockroach-infested MacDougal Street walkup she’s found on a salary of eight dollars an hour. So she signs on as a real-estate trainee in a seedy office run by a mannish woman named Dale and is soon earning commissions on various weird lofts and living spaces. Wearying of Dale’s out-loud fantasizing about the young girls she lusts after, Liv moves on to a much more upscale firm, raking in bigger commissions and learning that rich clients can be really strange. (One couple asks whether she’d be interested in donating an egg or two to provide a sibling for their precious tot. She demurs.) Her affair with Andrew Lugar, an eccentric architect who likes to bite during sex, is going nowhere; ditto her divorce. After reading Andrew’s diary, annoyed by his loony, egomaniacal descriptions of their slightly warped romance and by the realization that he never intended to leave his girlfriend, Liv contemplates shooting the jerk. She settles for dumping him after he chomps off her earlobe. Nothing ever comes up roses for this contemporary urban heroine: her soon-to-be-ex is selling their old apartment, she has to show it to buyers who criticize the décor . . . and so on. All this convoluted action would be a lot more compelling, however, if Liz had even half the sexiness and spunk of Bennington Bloom, Going Down’s call-girl heroine
A meandering story, though funny enough in a blasé way, featuring sly asides on everything from the perfidy of men to the purpose of Thanksgiving turkeys.Pub Date: May 7, 2001
ISBN: 1-57322-185-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
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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