A big fish story, and breathy prose (“She looked at him standing onshore, and knew right then that it didn’t matter how many...
Third tearjerker from romancer Yorke (and her first hardcover), about a woman’s recovery from the loss of her baby son.
One day 18 years ago, Kate Vegas’s husband Ray and infant William vanished into thin air. Car accident? Kidnapping? Worse: Ray sold William for $50,000 to pay off his gambling debts, then ran off to Mexico. Kate’s father Gerald, an LAPD detective, pulled every string, but the investigation never came up with a lead, and he and Kate were left to recover from the shock on their own. Suicidally depressed for years after, Kate eventually became a foster mother and took a succession of troubled children into her home for months or years at a time. Her latest charge is Wayne, a 17-year-old who has recovered from drug addiction and wants to become a fisherman. Kate takes him up to Seal Bay, an old fishing town in northern California, to see whether he can find work on a crew. He takes a job on Ben Dodson’s boat, and Kate stays on for a while to see him settled into his new life. Ben is a widower with two daughters Wayne’s age, so he and Kate find themselves with a common bond and soon fall in love (as does Wayne with one of the Dodson girls). Yet Kate is still troubled by her loss of William after all these years, her grief sharpened into real fear as she begins to receive baby pictures of William anonymously through the mail. Is Ray trying to torment her? Is William still alive? Her only clue is a Cambridge, Massachusetts, postmark. But for a detective’s daughter, that’s enough to start with.
A big fish story, and breathy prose (“She looked at him standing onshore, and knew right then that it didn’t matter how many hearts shattered around her, she was going to marry him, and fast”) that brings a whiff of the low tide.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2003
ISBN: 0-425-18824-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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