A caper novel for fans of country music legend Rogers.
The country star extends his brand by collaborating on a book that shows how to hold ’em and know when to fold 'em.
Someone who loves country music from the 1970s and '80s, Texas Hold 'em and Texas in general could probably guess what’s in this novel before reading it. Credited to Rogers (Luck or Something Like It, 2012) and regional novelist Blakely (Come Sundown, 2006, etc.), the plot involves a country singer who shares some biographical particulars with Rogers (earlier rock success before a big country breakthrough, Houston-area roots, an insider’s knowledge of Nashville and the music business, and a big hit about gambling) and puts him in the middle of all sorts of complications that involve gambling, a scheme to con a con man, a television pilot, an international betting ring, the FBI and CIA, a heart transplant, a loving mama and romantic intrigue with a beautiful woman who becomes his manager. How beautiful? “You’re drop-dead gorgeous, Dorothy! The cameras would feast on you like a lion on a Watusi!” And “you make Sophia Loren look like a second runner-up in a plain Jane pageant.” And “Brigitte Bardot would kill Raquel Welch for your looks.” Yet the plotting manages to withstand all the chicken-fried clichés, as the stakes continue to escalate beyond anything the reader and most of the characters had anticipated. As the protagonist prepares to launch his country career by appearing as featured entertainment on a televised poker tournament that hopscotches across Texas, the gambling pits seasoned professionals and ringers against amateurs who “looked as if they couldn’t tell an ace in the hole from a hole in the ground.” After a stop in San Antonio includes the obligatory visit to the Alamo (“That there is hallowed ground”), the novel reaches its climax with perhaps the wildest night ever experienced at Gilley’s, once the ultimate Texas honky-tonk. It’s pretty easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys and to guess who will win.
A caper novel for fans of country music legend Rogers.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2385-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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