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
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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