A well-crafted adaptation that offers readers richly developed, relatable characters.
Contemporary language takes the place of Elizabethan English in this surprisingly fresh retelling of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Debut novelist Lehmann adheres to the Bard’s plot, although, in this version, Hamlet’s trusted friend and confidant Horatio tells a good deal of the tale. Instead of opening the story with a visit from the ghost of Hamlet’s fallen father, readers join Horatio just days after the tragic deaths of the Danish royal family. Horatio’s task—undoubtedly a familiar one to students of English literature—is to write a report for his country’s new king examining the factors that led to the court’s “catastrophic destruction.” Through interviews, Horatio’s own recollections, and retrieved diary entries and letters, readers learn how Prince Hamlet’s vow to avenge his father’s death ultimately toppled a kingdom. Horatio serves as an able storyteller—offering readers a primer that prepares them to dive deeper into Shakespeare’s classic tragedy. But the novel is also at work on another level: Horatio’s narration is interspersed with third-person passages allowing a closer look into the minds of Hamlet’s love interest, Ophelia, and his mother, Gertrude. The motivations of these women have long been debated by scholars, in part because female characters receive scant attention in the original play. Lehmann’s version, by contrast, offers fuller portrayals. Gertrude, for example, has “never completely trusted” Claudius, and Ophelia, mourning the death of her father and still reeling from the loss of Hamlet’s affections, yearns for the simplicity of childhood’s protective cloak. Such humanizing details ensure that each woman’s death is a tragedy in its own right. The scene building up to Ophelia’s drowning is especially haunting: “The rush of the water was mesmerizing….Its gurgle, and the splash off the wheel as it turned over, were voices she knew and trusted,” Lehmann writes. “There was almost a sleepiness to it, the sound of a caress, of liquid inevitability.”
A well-crafted adaptation that offers readers richly developed, relatable characters.Pub Date: April 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4834-2867-3
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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