THE HERO’S WALK

Name: THE HERO’S WALK
Author: Anita Rau Badami
ISBN: 1-56512-312-3

by Anita Rau Badami ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 27, 2001

Well-written, heartwarming: indeed, a kind of Indian Christmas Carol—but one in which the characterization and story play a...

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A provincial Bengali family enters the 21st century, in this earnest story set in Toturpuram, "a squalid little town" on the Bay of Bengal.

Badami's second novel (her first was published in 1996 in Canada, where she now lives) is as much about the everyday difficulties—lack of fresh water, erratic electricity, all-pervasive governmental corruption—of contemporary Indian life as it is about the ostensible plot. The author peppers her narrative with precious anecdotes about the eccentrics who populate Toturpuram: a madwoman who directs traffic half-naked; an ancient exhibitionist dubbed "Chocobar" after his cocoa-hued member; a housewife who snips the ends off her neighbor's drying laundry, and so on. Then there’s Sripathi Rao, a high-caste ad copywriter of a certain age, who fears nothing more than the poverty and chaos that surrounds him. He lives with a pack of characters straight from central casting—pious wife Nirmala, activist son Arun, witchy mother Ammaya, spinster sister Putti—in the rundown mansion built by his dead father. At the start, Sripathi learns that his grown daughter Maya, estranged for nine years after her marriage to an American, has been killed, along with her husband, in a car crash. Sripathi travels to Vancouver and fetches Nandana, Maya's headstrong seven year-old daughter, now rendered mute by the trauma of her parents' death. Accustomed to spotless houses, video games, and sugary breakfast cereals, Nandana reacts badly to the ripe smells and mysterious foods of India. The child's presence, however, offers the prickly, embittered Sripathi, who cut his daughter off without a second thought, a chance to redeem himself, in part by becoming free of antiquated ideas about obligation and etiquette (represented, rather clunkily, by the family's rotting house).

Well-written, heartwarming: indeed, a kind of Indian Christmas Carol—but one in which the characterization and story play a subservient role to the somewhat labored strokes of local color.

Pub Date: April 27, 2001

ISBN: 1-56512-312-3

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Algonquin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001

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

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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.