Slow-paced and heavy going at times but well worth reading for its profound and unsentimental exploration of the grieving...
McFarland (The Music Room, 1990; A Face at the Window, 1997, etc.) plunges the reader into the maelstrom of grief that arises in the aftermath of the random murder of a college professor.
Malcolm Vaughn is shot to death by a stranger on a suburban Boston street one night while his wife Sarah and eight-year-old son Harry look on. The killer gets away and, despite diligent police work, is never caught. From the hospital emergency room, Sarah calls Malcolm’s best friend, a black Vietnam vet named Deckard Jones, whose checkered past initially causes suspicion to turn toward him and Sarah. But this is not a crime novel, and the scenes of police investigation and media exploitation feel forced. McFarland’s real subject is grief, the deep and wide swath it cuts across his characters’ lives, and the minute gradations of anxiety, anger, desperation, and guilt each experiences. The point of view shifts repeatedly, as if McFarland doesn’t want us to miss a second of anyone’s ordeal. Racked with self-blame and despair that takes the form of literal back pain, Sarah is both unable to work and unable to mother her son. As a result, her emotional paralysis forces Harry into an unnatural stoicism despite grotesque nightmares and an onslaught of secret bedwetting. Deckard’s friendship with the Vaughns, especially with Harry, is intense (though the connection through Malcolm, explained late in the story, remains a contrivance), but his ability to offer real support is thwarted by his own crisis of memory activated by Malcolm’s death. Deckard and Sara’s relationship is wonderfully complex, platonic yet laden with misunderstandings born of well-meaning affection as Sarah gropes toward “a bearable future.”
Slow-paced and heavy going at times but well worth reading for its profound and unsentimental exploration of the grieving process.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8050-6608-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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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