Good, clean, lighthearted fun with a moral ending.
Author, screenwriter, and producer Ephron follows her first novel (Hanging Up, 1995, inspiration for the current film starring Diane Keaton) with another frothy family romp, this about a single-mom journalist who moves to a bucolic Long Island shore town to save her incommunicado 15-year-old from the perils of a Manhattan adolescence.
Lily Davis knows her son, Sam, is sneaking out to clubs at night, but when she discovers a steak knife in his bureau, she decides it’s time to get out of Dodge. Settling in Sakonnet Bay, she lands a job on the local paper. Covering a story in which the baby with its head stuck in a pitcher at Claire’s Collectibles turns out to be a vicious dachshund, she’s attracted to the cop who comes to her rescue. When she and Sgt. Tom McKee find themselves in a mansion with a naked woman sprawled across a bed, Lily gets her first clue that Brigadoon has as many issues as she does, and the plot turns into a typical small-town crime story where everyone is suspect. Add to the mix her son’s new haircut (shaved except for a tail spouting from the center of his head); his girlfriend, who speaks in the Star Trek language Klingon; and a town divided over the fate of the deer population (hunters are lined up against the Friends of Bambi), and you have the premise for a hilarious if stock fish-out-of-water tale. Can Lily give up “a city that can do more for you than a husband or a lover” for a place where everyone knows your whereabouts by the dents in your car? The answer lies in her column, “Big City Eyes,” in which she lampoons the locals, sends cryptic messages about her personal life, and dispels rumors that Sam is a member of the Aryan nation.
Good, clean, lighthearted fun with a moral ending.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-399-14391-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000
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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