A story “ripped from the headlines” and transformed into a bitter, gemlike work of art. (See above.)
The recent school shootings that have lodged in the American consciousness as a recurring dark nightmare inspire a powerful fictional counterpart in Shepard’s vivid, frightening sixth novel.
The narrator is 14-year-old Edwin Hanratty, an underachieving eighth-grader whose studied disrespect for all things adult and eloquent foul mouth instantly remind us of Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. “I’m the kid you think about when you want to make yourself feel better,” he ruefully confides. Indeed, everything in his life is either irritant or disappointment. Teachers and older classmates are out to get him; girls simultaneously attract and annoy him. Five-year-old brother Gus asks too many questions. His mom smothers him with understanding, while his college-teacher dad affects the sangfroid of a sarcastic disciplinarian. An elderly “pervert” in a car is stalking Edwin and his best (make that only) friend Roddy (a.k.a. “Flake”); worse, a pushy sixth-grader, Hermie, wants to hang with them. Shepard’s grasp of the roiling, unstable psychology of adolescence couldn’t be sharper, and he leads us skillfully through his protagonists’ embattled days, until the one when Flake shows Edwin his father’s guns, and begins to hatch the plan that Edwin (a dreamy kid whose random drawings express fantasies of theoretical violence) comes to think of as their “Project X.” This spare narrative is fleshed out with deft foreshadowings (e.g., a lamebrained plot to infect their school’s ventilation system with toxic “bug powder”) and mordantly amusing vignettes, such as a confrontation with Hermie’s “enemy” during which Flake and Edwin identify themselves as Ed Gein and Richard Speck. The climax is a swift, stunning chaos of uncoordinated actions and responses, in which Flake fulfills his sociopathic dreams appallingly, and Edwin—eternally the kid who never finishes what he starts—silently despairs “I’m a joke . . . a house burning down from the inside out.”
A story “ripped from the headlines” and transformed into a bitter, gemlike work of art. (See above.)Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4071-X
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
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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