Another intergenerational romance from Bickmore (The Moon Below, 1990, etc.) demonstrating that today's daughters who get it all must thank a generation of mothers who made painful choices to expand women's roles. It's the year South Pacific opened on Broadway. Sydney Hamilton glimpses struggling actor Jordan Eliot across a crowded Manhattan room—she's never seen anyone so handsome before—and Jordan watches Sydney, down from Wellesley, as she shimmies atop a piano, and thinks she's the classiest girl in the world. And why not? She's from one of America's founding families: the well-heeled Hamiltons of Maryland, who have owned the Chesapeake island of Oberon since the 17th century. Against her father's wishes, Sydney marries Jordan—a marriage that produces little Ashley and Juliet. Jordan becomes a major movie star, but Sydney is bored in Hollywood, where she lives only vicariously through her husband. Then, after a disastrous sojourn on a movie set in the Congo, Sydney takes the girls back east to Oberon (Bickmore's version of Tara) and to her family: withholding father, publisher of the highly conservative New York Chronicle; loving mother and grandmother who want more for Sydney; bon vivant Uncle Billy, who knows where a rich girl can get a safe abortion; and Sydney's brother Evan, for whom a legion of bimbos can never fill his sister's shoes. Sydney becomes a successful newspaper publisher, and, as a proponent of a woman's right to choose, she reverses the Chronicle's politics. Meanwhile, Ashley, the good daughter, becomes a veterinarian, as Juliet, angry and troubled, almost kills herself with liquor and drugs. When Evan tries to sell Oberon to developers, Jordan and Sydney, now in their 50s, join forces to keep their Middle Atlantic Bali Hai safe for future generations of Hamiltons and migrating birds. Fresh and inventive romance does battle against a sometimes overbearing political agenda: Jordan and Sydney get back together after Jordan admits that his consciousness has been ``awakened.'' Frankly, everybody, he does give a damn.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8217-4923-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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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