A touching, able, not-too-sentimental look at the ties that bind.
Old friendships and broken dreams in small-town tales of love and betrayal.
Second-novelist Hammond (Going to Bend, 2003) revisits the hardscrabble landscape of coastal Oregon—and ends up in Hubbard, a highway-side township of truckers, used-car salesmen and career waitresses. Her story circles around two long-time residents, high-school friends Anita and Bunny, whose lives have taken somewhat different turns. While Anita, the high-school beauty queen, has married Bob, a lackluster provider who disappears on drinking binges for days on end, Bunny, pregnant in high school, has ended up with Hack, a charming man’s-man who’s supplied her and her daughter with a good home, dental care and a steady income from his job on the used car lot. Yet, as Hammond shows, luck doesn’t always move in one direction. While Anita has always been sure of Bob’s love, Bunny has always had doubts about whether she can keep Hack, a wheeler-dealer who attracts attention wherever he goes, and who now seems to have an eye on the rump of a pretty young thing at work. As the story unfolds, Hammond is deft at balancing the subtle tensions that make for complex characters: It turns out that Bob does love Anita but has also been having an affair with Warren, his childhood friend, on and off for years. And Hack does want to stray but is running from a secret far more serious than any infidelity. Anita and Bunny, whose jealousies run deeply alongside their old friendships, perform a delicate yet careworn dance of balancing their men, each other and the weight of their differently frustrated ambitions. This is, in many ways, a novel about dreams that don’t come true: All of these lives have been dealt raw deals—no one has great expectations, and many have diminished circumstances. Nonetheless, Hammond paints her characters with care, fondness and great dignity.
A touching, able, not-too-sentimental look at the ties that bind.Pub Date: July 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-50944-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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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