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THE BARBARIANS ARE COMING

Name: THE BARBARIANS ARE COMING
Author: David Wong Louie
ISBN: 0-399-14603-2

by David Wong Louie ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

As grandly comic as an American carnival and as tragic as any Chinese opera.

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One of the most moving father-son stories in decades, this first novel from the author of the prize-winning collection Pangs

of Love (1991) is also a knowing and witty take on the immigrant experience, at the same time that it transcends the particularities of that experience. Sterling Lung is a great cook but, by his own admission, a lousy son. The offspring of Chinese immigrants "Zsa Zsa" and "Genius" Lung, he doesn't want to take over the family business (a laundry) or to marry the imported Chinese girl of his parents' dreams. Sterling expresses himself through food, and as the story begins, is employed as a chef by a Connecticut WASP women's club. The opening scene’sterling is cooking a lavish meal for a blind date while his putative girlfriend, Bliss, is on her way to visit him—establishes him as a sensualist while the subsequent scenes make clear that he's rather detached in more traditional emotional ways. In any case, Sterling goes on to marry Bliss and to bond with her warm but demanding Jewish father; their two children, Moses and Ira, personify their parents' hope for a peaceful, blended, multicultural future. But Sterling, in his typically ambivalent way, messes up: There's an incident—reminiscent, in its surreal horror, of that in John Irving's The World According to Garp—and a death. Sterling's self-conscious paranoia has, literally, done his family in. But it is only after he has lost nearly everything that he can allow himself to learn about the choices and disappointments his father—who has always seemed so sure of everything’suffered before he was born.

As grandly comic as an American carnival and as tragic as any Chinese opera.

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-399-14603-2

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE ALCHEMIST

by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

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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.