An earnest, candid portrayal of a woman who learns just as much about herself as she does of others.
In Diersen’s (Unmatched, 2012) drama, a Marine wife’s animosity toward an insolent, chauvinistic sergeant is matched only by her growing fondness for the man’s fiancee.
Jackie’s husband, Sgt. Kevin Thompson, introduces her to Katrine, soon to be part of the Marine Corps family via her marriage to Sgt. Rob Copeland. Right away, Jackie doesn’t like Rob; at a party, he humiliates Katrine for not wanting to play a board game and initiates unwanted physical contact with Jackie. Her liberal views are constantly at odds with Rob’s conservatism, yet her relationship with Katrine flourishes, and soon the new acquaintances are much more than mere friends. It’s only a matter of time before possessive Rob learns that the women have become lovers, and because a prologue teases that someone’s been killed, things aren’t likely to turn out well. Diersen’s novel features a complex protagonist who’s reticent and standoffish, but she’s actually pushing people away for reasons that are eventually revealed to both herself and readers. Despite her self-described “defective filter,” the opinionated Jackie isn’t especially offensive in any of her stances. She’s also quite charming: For Halloween, she dresses as an amnesiac and, in response to Kevin’s question of what they should call her, wryly says, “That’s a good question.” Jackie engages in numerous political discussions throughout the story, but the ones with Rob are eventually redundant, simply confirming what’s already been well established—that he’s sexist and insulting. The book tackles several serious issues, including abusive relationships (even if the abuse isn’t always physical) and neglectful parents. But Diersen keeps the story light with dark humor, most notably an abundance of jokes about murder, like Jackie telling her friend Lyn that she doesn’t want to see Rob dead but would prefer it over seeing him alive. Jackie does seem to be testing her marriage in the story, but her scenes with Kevin are some of the book’s best; the couple’s ebullient banter, even when talking about the volatile Rob, is irresistible fun.
An earnest, candid portrayal of a woman who learns just as much about herself as she does of others.Pub Date: July 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0692201138
Page Count: 450
Publisher: Blue Gentian Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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