A young woman with no memory of her history or how she got to Still Waters Mental Hospital struggles to uncover the traumas of her past and solve the mystery of who she is.
Shelburne’s novel opens with the central mystery of the title character as she undergoes intensive therapy to discover why she has no memories of her life. Shelburne expertly weaves a complicated narrative through a series of flashbacks; readers are guided through Clemmie’s life as she recovers her missing memories and as she experiences the harsh realities of life in a mental hospital. As a child, Clemmie moves from Chicago to Savannah, Ga., with her mother and new stepfather, Roy. There she meets Daniel, a boy who becomes her best friend despite the fact that she is white and he is black, and they live in the contentious ’60s South. But Clemmie is destined for a life of tragedy, and it may be that the loss of Daniel is a memory that she doesn’t want to remember. Later, Clemmie’s family moves to Hilton Head, S.C., where Clemmie spends her teen years, and tragedy is again ever-present in her life. The book reads as a love letter to the South in many ways, and Shelburne describes the beauty of the distinctive coastal region in wonderful detail. As Clemmie remembers more of her past, drawing ever closer to the mystery of how she arrived at Still Waters, several characters emerge to populate her life. From Mama Rae, the mysterious woman who lives in the woods and practices voodoo, to Addie Jo, a malicious home-wrecker, to Jimmy Castlebrook, a man who may just be the love of Clemmie’s life, every character is rendered with unique details. At times, however, it feels as if characters come and go too frequently, a symptom of the scope of the story. Since the novel spans most of Clemmie’s life, it often moves along at a hurried pace, and moments and characters that should be lingered over are passed by too quickly in favor of advancing the story along. Likewise, emotional moments that should have a significant effect on Clemmie’s life sometimes feel glossed over and not fully explored. A fluid narrative that weaves through memory and time and an in-depth character study of a woman’s journey to recover herself.
Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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