A keen and delightful multigenre tale about a hero grappling with two worlds.
Traveling to a dreamlike realm, a man embarks on a difficult quest but may have trouble returning to reality in this novel.
Burt Higgins spends his post-retirement days alone in his Massachusetts home. His wife, Betty, a retired art teacher, is in New York studying for her MFA. One day, Burt lights a candle he bought in Prague, where the shopkeeper claimed the item was magical. A boy appears and says he’s Burt’s guide to take him wherever he wishes to travel. He chooses to go to “the source of despair,” apparently the origin of the “murky shadow” connected to the guide. In this other world, two children, Matthias and Hannah, mistake Burt, still in his bathrobe, for a wizard. He befriends them and their mother, Elizabeth. When someone later abducts one of the kids, Burt revises his mission—ending all despair—to include a rescue. This is possible, as the guide is the “scribe” of Burt’s story. But it means Burt will be part of this world and have a harder time returning to his own. Soon, he’s recalling memories of life with Betty and their two kids and questioning which world is the real one. Litwack (Along the Watchtower, 2018, etc.) doesn’t hide the possibility that Burt is dreaming. But there is definite mystery, as the protagonist suspects the realm he believed was real is actually a dream. This makes for intriguing dual worlds: The alternate one is often familiar (a family much like Burt’s) while the real world has fantasy elements (terrorists are cruel in the same way as storybook villains). Ultimately, the tale excels as a fantasy, with elements like portals and an enchanted sword, and as a drama, with breast-cancer survivor Betty having undergone a biopsy, its results unknown at the narrative’s start. But the author truly shines in more conceptual moments. Burt contemplates a version of the afterlife that is, essentially, a “forever dream” of accumulated, imagination-enhancing memories.
A keen and delightful multigenre tale about a hero grappling with two worlds.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-62253-442-5
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Evolved Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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