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PART OF HIS STORY

Name: PART OF HIS STORY
Author: Alfred Corn
ISBN: 0-922811-29-6

by Alfred Corn ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 15, 1997

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An elegy to love lost and found in which poet Corn (Incarnation: Contemporary Writers on the New Testament, 1990) tests the waters of fiction for the first time. Avery Walsh, like all expatriates, is on the lam. A successful New York playwright, Avery is in Britain just now, taking his time over a biography he's been commissioned to write of the 18th- century London playwright Colley Cibber. Not anyone's idea of a workaholic, Avery manages to keep his heart in his work because it's dangerous to do otherwise: His lover Joshua has recently died of AIDS, and there's little joy in thinking of their lives together, though that is what he mostly does. ``Certainly,'' he asserts, ``I don't plan to come off as broken down with bereavement and sorrow (but I am, I am!).'' So he plods through his days, making notes and checking references at the British Museum and dealing with a few select literary friends in Hampstead or Spitalfields to keep up on the local gossip and the word from home. Then he meets Maeve Findlater, a leftist activist from Ireland, while she is passing out anti-apartheid leaflets on the street. She introduces him to her brother Derek, a reformed junkie on the dole. Avery is quickly drawn into a kind of emotional alliance with the two, a bond of desperation mixed with anger that awakens many of the feelings he's tried to suppress—especially when he and Derek find themselves falling in love. The fear of loss that Avery carries within him, though, suddenly becomes cruelly literal when Maeve and Derek become embroiled in violence during a mysterious trip to Ireland. In the end, Avery has to return to the life that he's left behind and discovers that he can, in fact, go home again. A work so beautifully constructed that one wants to overlook its rambling narrative, hackneyed plot, and two-dimensional people. Impressive in parts, but finally unpersuasive.

Pub Date: March 15, 1997

ISBN: 0-922811-29-6

Page Count: 288

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

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THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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THE ALCHEMIST

by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

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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.