A thoughtful and useful work of self-help tips as fiction.
A debut self-help novel tells the story of two traumatized friends attempting to get past the abuses they suffered as children.
Even though she is a financially successful woman of 35, Anne Davis keeps choosing deadbeat guys. She’s a rescuer: trying to save Derek from his own abusive behavior in the hopes that he’ll finally be well enough to love her back. She knows it stems from some abandonment issues from never having met her father, coupled with the grief she still feels over the death of her son. Knowing where it comes from doesn’t really help, unfortunately. Luckily, Anne has Dominic in her life. He's been her friend for years and undergone his own cycles of bad decision-making before finally becoming a respected counselor. Dominic was molested as a child by a pair of older girls (his babysitters), which greatly informs his sex life and his emotional state as an adult. With the help of Dominic and another old friend, Josie, Anne digs deeper into her life and finds trauma that she wasn’t previously aware of. Even better, they help her to work through that pain in order to stop searching for love from impossible sources and find it within herself. Following the conclusion of the tale, Mason and Andrada provide 40 pages of helpful strategies for people who have found themselves in situations similar to those of Anne and Dominic. The authors write in a buoyant prose that keeps the story peppy and easy to read even in its heavier moments. Sprinkled throughout the dialogue are snippets of self-help ideas that relate to the problems of the characters. “I’ve found there are three types of people,” explains Dominic at one point. “Doers, feelers and thinkers. Doers, like myself, are goal oriented. They don’t have time for emotions. Feelers are driven by emotions. All decisions are based on feelings. Thinkers are driven by logic.” That the novel is written primarily as a teaching aid (rather than for the tale itself) saps it of the urgency readers normally expect in fiction. But the book succeeds in terms of demonstrating the issues and the coping mechanisms advocated by the authors.
A thoughtful and useful work of self-help tips as fiction.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9978938-2-3
Page Count: 202
Publisher: Seattle Indie Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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