A competent, engaging, though unsurprising, romance.
Turner’s fiction debut is a romantic tale about a young doctor who discovers that life amounts to more than professional success.
Nate Williams is a 32-year-old cardiologist who has spent his entire life devoted to perfecting his professional skills. His devotion has come with a hefty price. Isolated from his peers due to his unwavering commitment to work, Nate leads a life devoid of culture and companionship and often finds the emotions of others unintelligible. After an exceptionally long, trying shift putting in stents, Nate finds himself arguing with an obese patient’s family members, who attempt to shift the blame of a heart attack from their unhealthy eating habits to their family member’s drinking and smoking. Almost getting into physical altercation, he’s put on leave from the hospital for a month and is angry, confused and worried about what to do with his free time—the first free time he has had since childhood. Despite his prickly nature, Nate is invited to a luau held by his co-worker (and favorite nurse) Sandy. After a personal debate, he attends and has a wonderful time. Nate finds Sandy to be beautiful and complex; a tentative romance buds between the two. Soon after, a disheveled Nate wanders into a bookstore; despite his unkempt appearance, he strikes up a conversation with the store’s owner, a vivacious young woman named Angela. The two become close fast, thanks in part to Angela’s inquisitive nature and willingness to include Nate in her many social activities and varied groups of friends. As Angela and Nate’s relationship grows, he finds himself awakened to a world he had shunned. Generally well-written and with developed characters, Turner’s first effort suffers from one major flaw: It’s a bit predictable. Readers familiar with the tale of the workaholic discovering the merits of life and love might find little here of interest. As Nate’s story increases in seriousness, the dialogue grows more clichéd: “Before I met him,” Angela states at one point, “Nate didn’t think he needed love in his life. Now I don’t think he can live without it.” Still, the storyline is heartfelt and maintains momentum.
A competent, engaging, though unsurprising, romance.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-4917-2880-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2014
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
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