This snapshot of life in a place where winter can be unspeakably cruel, where simply staying alive is a victory, proves...
Ekbäck takes readers on a journey to Swedish Lapland in 1717, a harsh and unforgiving place where the supernatural bleeds over into the difficult lives of the few settlers trying to make it through a hardscrabble winter.
It's June, and 14-year-old Fredericka and Dorotea, her 6-year-old sister, are herding goats in the glade near their cabin when they stumble across the horribly mutilated body of a man. Ever since the family moved to Blackäsen Mountain from their seacoast home, they've spent most of their time preparing for the difficult winter headed their way. Their parents, Paavo and Maija, recently migrated from Finland after trading their boat for a patch of ground and a cabin. Paavo couldn’t wait to leave fishing once he discovered his hereditary aversion to water. Now they're wondering what type of place they’ve settled in, with murdered men and secrets swirling around them. The dead man, identified as Eriksson, had been missing for three days, but no one seems particularly disturbed at his slaying, and word is out that bad things happen on the mountain. Maija decides to keep investigating Eriksson’s death, even though it’s not a popular move with the mountain's other inhabitants, and soon begins uncovering evidence of supernatural happenings on Blackäsen, along with a litany of unexplained deaths and events. And despite the unpopularity of Maija’s moves, she refuses to let it go, even when events begin to spin out of her control and her family is threatened. Ekbäck's straightforward prose lacks nuance, but her first novel takes readers into places that few will ever have gone.
This snapshot of life in a place where winter can be unspeakably cruel, where simply staying alive is a victory, proves irresistible.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60286-252-4
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Weinstein Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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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