A novel of grief, love, and truth that offers insights about a family and a satisfying resolution.
A daughter comes to terms with family secrets as she deals with the effects of two tragedies from New York’s recent history.
In this novel, Impellizzeri (Lawyer Interrupted, 2016, etc.) follows two parallel narratives, those of Lu Roselli, dealing with the aftermath of a disaster and unraveling family mysteries, and her mother, Mari Guarez Roselli, a Guatemalan immigrant thinking back over her life while trapped in a coma. In 2012, Lu, ambivalent about a planned trip to her mother’s homeland, misses her flight, which crashes into her Queens neighborhood shortly after takeoff, leaving Mari injured and unconscious. Lu deals with her survivor’s guilt—an emotion she has lived with for more than a decade after her father and twin sister died on 9/11—while waiting to see if Mari will recover. Lu makes plans for the baby she did not know that her mother was carrying and sorts through the growing riddles of her family history and her complicated mother-daughter relationship. As Lu’s narrative progresses, the chapters alternate with those told from Mari’s perspective, flashbacks to her experiences in Guatemala and New York that serve to answer the questions Lu raises. Lu eventually travels to Guatemala, where she meets the nun who tells her the story Mari is revealing to the reader and also meets a man who becomes the first friend she has made in years. Impellizzeri draws on Guatemalan traditions to develop the book’s recurring motifs, particularly the practice of sharing worries with tiny dolls and the Mayan calendar projection that the end of the world will occur in December 2012, demonstrating a solid knowledge of the country’s history and culture. Thanks to Mari’s narration, the reader ends up with a more complete picture of the Roselli family than Lu does, an unusual choice but one that makes for an emotionally rewarding conclusion. The prose is serviceable, and the plot, though driven by complex layers of feelings and relationships, is fast-paced and not unnecessarily complicated.
A novel of grief, love, and truth that offers insights about a family and a satisfying resolution.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-942545-65-1
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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