A steamy tale and beguiling thriller, with plenty of local color and some provocative twists.
A young landscaper gets caught up in the drug trade in this debut novel.
Bobby Patrick is a 24-year-old in Austin, Texas, whose days are spent getting high, swimming in the lake, and dreaming about how to get ahead. A dyslexic, he failed to get through college, as words on a page “ran every which direction, as if something big was chasing them.” He has a new girlfriend, Katherine “Katie” Ann Smith, a waitress at a local diner, and the two are getting serious and talking marriage. Within their relatively small social universe, which is largely made up of marijuana dealers and thieves who have wealthy parents, Bobby and Katie navigate through various personal dramas. Katie’s not-so-nice best friend, Sara, slept with Bobby once. Katie doesn’t know about it, and Sara is holding it over Bobby’s head. Katie harbors a skeleton or two in her closet as well. While Bobby struggles to save money as a landscaper, he and Katie plan to open a restaurant. Katie has an affluent lawyer father, but there is a complication. Sara gets arrested and wants Bobby to bail her out and pay for an attorney. Just as Bobby realizes Sara may have gotten mixed up with the wrong people in the drug trade, he faces an uncertain future as he is drawn further into a mess that may have more to do with Katie than he could ever have imagined. Burlison sets his story in the heady days of the early 1990s in Austin, though his characters are perhaps more aloof than one would expect of the Generation X social scene. But they are certainly Texans. Bobby, an East Texan, is a scrappy self-starter and problem solver, while Katie and Sara are forthright and controlling, but still looking to daddy to bail them out. Burlison manages to make Bobby a sympathetic protagonist, even though the characters here are involved with drugs by their own choice. The winding and increasingly sinister plot holds some exciting scenes. But the author relies too much on small talk and continual dialogue, and he takes his time shaping the storyline.
A steamy tale and beguiling thriller, with plenty of local color and some provocative twists.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9969696-0-4
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Barton Creek Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2016
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
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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