The construction business is on solid ground, the bureau is a little shaky.
The careers of a homebuilder and a bureaucrat converge on the booming fringe of Ottawa.
McAdam’s debut flexes considerable muscle once it settles down from a jittery beginning in the minds of Jerry McGuinty, an understandably inarticulate, up-from-nothing builder and his cirrhotic, delusional, estranged wife Kathleen. Carefully constructing McGuinty’s progress up the ranks from gofer to drywall drudge to plaster artist to developer, McAdam tackles concurrently the rise of Simon Struthers, a thoroughly unpleasant bureaucrat, a bachelor with a bad habit of boffing the wives of his co-workers and, when appropriate, his co-workers. Struthers, son of an MP, independently wealthy, and totally amoral, drifts into semipotency in a department with controls over city development, a course that will place his one real project, a greenbelt, square in the path of Jerry McGuinty’s subdivisions. McGuinty’s ambitions and work ethic absorb him totally and leave him oblivious both to Irish-born Kathleen’s hard-to-miss alcoholism and to the wretched life of their only son. He also manages to miss the fact that Kathleen pretty much loathes him and would gladly chuck husband, son, and the succession of bigger homes to return to her loose life running a lunch wagon from one construction site to the next. What works here is the portrait of Jerry and the insight into the rough world and odd priorities of the people who shape the houses most of us live in and are occasionally mystified by. Less believable is the utter corruption of the urban mandarin who, when he is not meddling with progress, spends an astonishing amount of time peering into the windows of his ladyloves, one of whom is much, much too young. The disintegration of the McGuintys’ wretched family is made palatable by a clever denouement that knits up the ambitions of the two men.
The construction business is on solid ground, the bureau is a little shaky.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-101028-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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