An absorbing story about both the supportive and destructive aspects of family entanglements.
A small child’s obvious need puts a world-weary New Yorker in touch with her own vulnerability and capacity for love.
When she first meets young Jenny Gilmour, Kate Andersen has lost her publishing job and her high-powered lawyer boyfriend in the same week, and she is in no mood to be motherly. However, when her neighbor Sally McKean introduces her to the 6-year-old she is babysitting indefinitely, the strange, silent girl tugs at her sympathies, and, almost against her will, Kate finds herself reaching out to Jenny. The lonely child responds to Kate’s simple kindness and slowly emerges from her shell. Kate begins to get some freelance work, and her boyfriend, Roger, calls and apologizes. Just when Kate’s life seems to be back on track, Jenny’s past intrudes in the form of a scheming absentee mother and a gangster who claims to be her father. Determined to protect the child who has become important to her, Kate is drawn into legal problems, physical danger, and the threat of losing Roger again. This engrossing romantic adventure combines mystery and psychological drama in an intricate study of family relationships, economic class, and child abuse, the sometimes-casual portrayal of which is disturbing. Sally, who is presented as basically good-hearted, if rough around the edges, constantly refers to Jenny as “Creephead” and almost always curses at her. Rothman-Hicks and Hicks (Weave a Murderous Web, 2016, etc.) avoid offering simple solutions, and the characters are often the victims of circumstance as well as their own failings. An emotionally incisive ending sidesteps pat resolutions.
An absorbing story about both the supportive and destructive aspects of family entanglements.Pub Date: April 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61309-869-1
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Wings ePress
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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