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THE CLEMATIS TREE

Name: THE CLEMATIS TREE
Author: Anne Widdecombe
ISBN: 0-297-64572-2

by Anne Widdecombe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2001

More subtly agenda-driven than most of its kind.

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First novel from a prominent British politician wrestles intelligently with the question of euthanasia, as the once close marriage of a couple with a brain-damaged son nearly breaks down.

Narrator Mark Wellings, initially a blindly self-absorbed husband and father, over the course of his story learns as much about life and faith as love. His wife Claire, the daughter of wealthy self-made businessman Sam Renwick, is also not terribly perceptive, but the pair’s obtuseness is as much a product of the strain of caring for son Jeremy as an innate personality trait. The story begins on the afternoon of daughter Pippa’s christening, when four-year-old Jeremy runs into the street and is hit by a speeding drunk driver. The boy survives but is severely disabled and requires constant tending to: he cannot speak, move, or feed himself. As the years pass, Claire retreats from friends and potentially helpful support groups, insisting on assuming full responsibility for Jeremy. Mark, bored with his accounting job and worn down by the tensions at home, suggests that he and Claire take a vacation. She insists he go alone. While on holiday Mark is tempted—though he doesn’t succumb—by an attractive, perceptive young widow he meets. As the Wellings drift further apart, Claire’s sister Sally, an MP, introduces a bill legalizing euthanasia under certain conditions. The press learns about Jeremy, and Mark and Claire must contend with all the unwanted media attention, as well as with a terrible accident in which some of Pippa’s school friends are killed. When Jeremy dies in a seeming accident, Mark decides he is now free to leave and make a new life for himself. But the author still has a few surprises up her sleeve, as she drives her sometimes overly action-packed plot to an affirmative end.

More subtly agenda-driven than most of its kind.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-297-64572-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Trafalgar

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000

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.