Spiritual fiction, as in The Pilgrim's Progress and Tolstoy's moral tales, can be sublime. In less imaginative works, such as The Celestine Prophecy and this debut novel, fiction turns to fortune cookie. Hunt (Learning to Learn: Maximizing Your Performance Potential, 1992, not reviewed) is an international business consultant, motivational speaker, and cofounder of a learning institute. Her present work tells of a band of 25 luminous beings as they are trained to take on human life and help rebuild human conditions on a spiritual foundation. At first completely ingenuous, each sentience comes to have a special quality: ``Zendar is centered and strong. Justin is feisty. Ashley is insightful. Jaron is open-minded and resourceful, and êlan brings enthusiasm to every adventure.'' They are led singly or in pairs through the Window of Time into simulations of Earth-life, where they have confrontations that generally dismay but eventually strengthen them. The whole band then experiences them at once, and discussion follows each simulation, while other learning devices include the nine Matos Mantras (willingness prayers) that the beings must remember and use. The Bunyanesque central device is that the beings should attempt to reach and climb Mount Akros to find the Cave of Compassion, where the peace and wisdom essential to spiritual life will be found. Occasionally, a being meets up with a difficulty faintly resembling the depravity of human life that causes prisons to be built (the climax, surprisingly, turns on a genetic defect: club feet), but a focus on inner strength and compassion sees the temporarily beleaguered being through despondency. The Message: There are two purposes to human life, one planetary (``to live the law of unconditional love in action'') and one personal (to use love in fulfilling minor missions that contribute to the whole of the human family). All you need is love, as John Lennon told us in three minutes. Is there an audience? Does care of the soul sell books? Are you kidding?
Pub Date: Oct. 3, 1996
ISBN: 0-7868-6177-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
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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