A richly plotted, entertaining, if credulity-streching, tale follows Charles “Chucky” Cronin, an Irish-Catholic Chicagoan, during his service in postwar Germany. In a lively and engaging early section, Greeley (Irish Lace, 1996, etc.) sketches Chucky’s Chicago youth with a casual facility, featuring his family, and particularly his parents, April and John, and their Depression-strained but durable love for one another. With sprightly doses of “Irish” family humor, and a series of misadventures that recall the work of John Irving in their unexpected audacity and originality, Greeley moves the tale along, writing with an uncritical fondness of the period. Chucky rescues his prom date from drowning, and leads his football team to victory in the final seconds of the Big Came, but neither effort earns him much pride: he routinely dismisses these events as the result of luck. Drafted toward the end of WWII, and sent to Germany as a member of the Constabulary—a sort of occupation police force—he falls in love with Trudi, a woman with a misleadingly Nazi-tinged past; happens upon a spiritual partnership with Brigitta, who awaits the return of her husband Kurt from a Russian prison camp; and discovers a black-market overseen by shady Americans, which he single-handedly unmasks. He also spirits Trudi and her family away from the reaches of the Constabulary. All of this is suspenseful fun, but Chucky’s unrelenting self-deprecation, his wearying insistence that he’s just an innocent rube before God, seems false, and finally taxes the reader’s credulity. And when Chucky eventually upsets all evil, beds the girl, affirms America’s generosity, becomes rich (as do his parents), and gets a promotion, that credulity is exhausted. Greeley’s familiar spiritual concerns—human guilt, one’s relation to God, and personal integrity—dominate Chucky’s reactions to these vigorously plotted events. But the incidents seem to leave his character untouched, making for a rather unmoving coming-of-age-tale. ($100,000 ad/promo)
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-86571-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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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