An absorbing, enlightening book that exemplifies the power of good storytelling.
Everything changes for Dulce Garcia, perennial party girl and sugar baby, when she meets Zavier, a freelance journalist, on a plane to the Dominican Republic, then gets caught in Puerto Rico during Hurricane Maria.
Dulce, whose parents were Cuban and Dominican, was born in Puerto Rico and has bounced her whole life between the mainland U.S. and the Caribbean. After having been groomed into prostitution while she was in high school in New York—“Dulce always remembered how she was fourteen and wearing a Minnie Mouse t-shirt when she met Jerry,” her pimp—Dulce escaped with the help of Marisol Rivera, the former director of a New York health clinic, but she's soon under the thumb of another abusive boyfriend. Seeking refuge with an aunt in the Dominican Republic, she meets Zavier, a young freelance journalist, as well as Phillip Gerard, a rich businessman. A couple of dates with Zavier has her falling for him, but then Gerard lures her with a luxury hotel stay and a shopping spree, and she convinces herself she didn’t deserve a sweet relationship anyway. Dulce travels with Gerard to Puerto Rico and decides to stay there, then winds up stuck on the island when Maria hits. Meanwhile, Marisol’s Puerto Rican cousins are in dire straits after the hurricane takes out their home, and as they and Dulce make their ways to safety, their stories will converge. Dulce reconnects with Zavier, whose press credentials give her opportunities she never dreamed possible even as their relationship fractures, while her connection to Gerard is of great interest to Marisol, who targets him for a cryptocurrency sting after he raises money ostensibly to help the island but then uses it to acquire prime island property at rock-bottom prices. The fourth title in de León’s genre-bending Justice Hustlers series is a multifaceted tale. On one level, it's an entertaining feminist heist tale with a satisfying Robin Hood–style caper or two, but where the book truly shines is in spotlighting the challenges facing former sex workers and in angling an unflinching lens on the plight of Puerto Rico, both before and after the Maria disaster.
An absorbing, enlightening book that exemplifies the power of good storytelling.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1579-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dafina/Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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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