Underdeveloped characters and too much melodrama mar an otherwise promising story of love and choice.
The final chapter in Sunderland’s (Offerings, 2009, etc.) faith-based trilogy chronicles the intersecting lives of a pregnant teen, an evangelical academic and an Italian friar.
Victoria, a 17-year-old Vietnamese-American, lost out on her inheritance from her recently departed great aunt due to an abortion the younger woman had years earlier. Faced with another pregnancy, the result of a rape, Victoria wants to keep the baby—a decision that puts her at odds with her callous senator mom. Fleeing to London to escape the family drama with the help of her kindhearted father, Victoria finds refuge with Frederick and Fanny Collingwood. Frederick himself had been sheltered by the family of Victoria’s father during the Vietnam War, when Frederick was a British correspondent on the run from the Viet Cong. Meanwhile, history professor Madeleine Seymour has traveled from San Francisco to London with her husband Jack in order to establish a children’s home (and clinic with prenatal counseling). Brother Cristoforo, visiting from Rome, helps Madeleine and Jack search for property when he’s not trying to save street urchin Nadia or preaching in places such as Hyde Park, where Victoria encounters him. Soon Madeleine, whose own daughter drowned at less than a year old, is looking after Victoria as the young American falls for William, the Collingwoods’ son, who is soon to be ordained a deacon. Coincidentally, Madeleine and Jack knew Victoria’s great aunt well, though they’re not fond of her mom, so they hide Victoria from the senator when she comes to town. By the time Victoria learns that her mother (who had an abortion she regretted a couple years after Victoria was born) had lied to her about William’s pending engagement and then got Brother Cristoforo arrested, the plot has entered pure soap opera territory. While the book’s descriptions of locations are painstakingly specific, the characters are rather broad and stock. We never get the sense that these are actual flesh-and-blood people who struggle deeply with the many contradictions between moral conviction and harsh reality.
Underdeveloped characters and too much melodrama mar an otherwise promising story of love and choice.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-6029-0219-0
Page Count: 332
Publisher: OakTara
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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