Young woman who survives a devastating plane crash with her body intact—and her memory wiped clean—struggles to piece together her complicated past.
Waking up in an Iowa hospital surrounded by beeping machines and people she does not know, Nell Slattery soon discovers she is a very lucky girl. She was found, along with hunky young actor Anderson Carroll, still strapped to her seat in a rural field where a passenger jet went down. She and Anderson were the only two to live. The daughter of the famous and reclusive painter Francis Slattery, Nell is told that she has a husband, Peter, and runs a Manhattan gallery with her pretty younger sister, Rory. She remembers nothing. It emerges that she and Peter were briefly separated after he had a one-nightstand with a co-worker, and she and Rory were not speaking before her fateful flight. Still, under the well-meaning ministrations of her new-agey mom, Nell returns to New York (and Peter) while ignoring the sinking feeling that she isn’t hearing the whole story. Back home she is dismayed to learn from various sources that she was previously a buttoned-up control freak with a wardrobe full of neutral colors. That is a far cry from the “fabulous” person she was hoping for. She was also a promising musician, who gave it all up after her father abandoned the family in her teens. Her father’s shadow looms large over Nell, and finding out more about him is part of the reason she allows a reality TV show to tell her story, against everyone’s better judgment. That makes sense, since it turns out that everyone in Nell’s inner circle has something to hide, and it is up to her to find the truth on her own. So she enlists Anderson, who has been self-medicating his post-crash PTSD with supermodels and booze, on a road trip to a small town that just might be the key to everything—if she can only remember where it is. Scotch (Time of My Life, 2009, etc.) crafts a plausible story, complete with a capable and prickly protagonist, that doesn't resort to any movie-of-the-week amnesia clichés. A dry-eyed modern take on healing and forgiveness.
Pub Date: April 12, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-15758-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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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