Henkin gives an overly self-serious treatment to a potentially engrossing debut about an adopted son coming to terms with Jewish identity and the many varieties of family. Narrator Ben Suskind and his younger brother Jonathan, both living in San Francisco, have long accepted the fact of their adoption, but that doesn't mean that relations with their Orthodox Jewish parents are smooth. Their father, old-fashioned and scholarly, has yet to accept Jonathan's homosexuality, while their mother clumsily leaves condoms on his bedside table when he visits. Meanwhile, both parents wish that 31-year-old Ben would move east and marry a nice Jewish girl instead of living with Jenny, a public defender and single mother. When Ben gets a letter from his birth mother, Susan, his parents are forced to tell him the truth: His birth parents were not, as he has always believed, Jewish—and Ben, until now an indifferent Jew, is shocked. Then Susan, escaping her troubled marriage and the pain left by another son's death, comes to California to establish a relationship with Ben. While the two don't immediately click, the experience moves Ben to reconsider his religious and familial identity. He attends synagogue for the first time in years and incorporates Jewish ritual into his life. This reinvigorated Judaism doesn't sit well with Jenny, however, who has problems of her own as she contemplates representing a rapist in court. With the future of their affair in doubt, Ben becomes preoccupied with family history. Curious about his brother's identity, he secretly travels to Chicago to impersonate Jonathan and seek out his brother's own birth mother—a desperate act that brings all of his relationships to a crisis. Henkin sets up intriguing family dynamics, but the far too earnest tone and sketchy characterizations fail to bring Ben's dilemmas to life. A welcome message of tolerance and inclusiveness unfortunately finds only tepid expression here.
Pub Date: April 14, 1997
ISBN: 0-399-14116-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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