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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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