The platitudes and occasional preaching go down pretty smoothly thanks to Adams’s sharp but good-natured wit.
In this sequel to The Godmother (2007), British author Adams coasts from chick lit to mother-hen lit.
Although Bea, 42, chose to break up her marriage to Jimmy, she still loves him. While they were married Bea worked as a journalist, but, with her mother’s financial help, she has been able to stay home with her three daughters since the divorce. Everyone with whom Bea has remained close, including Jimmy and his family, considers her a perfect mother, but overweight Bea is desperately lonely and unhappy. Just as she finds the courage to tell Jimmy she wants to try again, she learns about Tessa, Jimmy’s new love (Tessa calls him James). In her late 30s, Tessa is a slim and relatively glamorous record-company lawyer, but she’s also devoted to her friends’ children and less secure than she might appear. She assumes Bea is a superwoman/mom and struggles mightily to find a place for herself in James/Jimmy’s children’s lives. The younger two are emotionally open but 14-year-old Amber, torn by her mixed loyalties to her parents, resists. At first Bea wins readers’ sympathies and Tessa seems the interloper, but the roles become less clear cut as Tessa genuinely embraces the children while Bea embraces a “miracle diet” which consists of eating nothing while drinking to unconsciousness. Amber, who has begun an innocent romance with Tessa’s 17-year-old godson Caspar, covers for Bea until a crisis in Tessa’s parents’ lives brings Bea’s secrets out into the open. Tessa learns the truth behind Bea’s divorce: post-abortion guilt, offered as a less-than-convincing excuse for Bea’s alcoholism. Newly self-sacrificing Tessa sends James/Jimmy back to an already reformed Bea to sort out their relationship once and for all. Not to worry, he is quick to realize that there is “love” and then there is “in love.”
The platitudes and occasional preaching go down pretty smoothly thanks to Adams’s sharp but good-natured wit.Pub Date: March 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-123265-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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