A quick and enjoyable sortie into the world of preteen family friendships and escapades.
Four children find enchantment while exploring a seaside cave in this debut middle-grade novel.
Twelve-year-old Addie Heath lives outside of London and isn’t looking forward to seeing her three rambunctious cousins again: Bodie, 6; Beanie, 9; and Jack, 13. They’ll all be staying at their grandparents’ beach house on the American East Coast. Spending time with her relatives would be bad enough. What makes it worse is that Grandma Winnie has died, and while Addie would prefer to be alone with her memories, she knows that her cousins will intrude on her sadness. The boys, for their part, are wary of Addie. To them, she seems aloof, and her accent makes her sound stuck-up. But Bodie’s excitement brings them together. When Addie dreams of a moonstone and Bodie finds one just like it, the cousins go exploring and uncover a secret realm linked somehow to their grandma’s past. Grandma Winnie was a Native American. Only Jack has inherited her looks, but all four children share an appreciation of her spirituality. When they find themselves in the Garden of Choice, with dangers ahead and only their family bond and a spirit wolf to protect them, Addie and her cousins must make peace with one another and with their grandma’s passing. Hobbs’ writing harks back to the days of Enid Blyton, with her multiage characters embarking on safe escapades while learning simple but important life lessons. The four Heath cousins are distinct in personality and speech and are vividly depicted across 10 black-and-white images by debut illustrator Parame. Addie’s love for her grandma is evident, as is her sense of loss, while her social conflict—she and the boys being forced together despite hardly knowing one another—is one that many children will relate to. The quest narrative itself is perhaps a little undemanding (the children have few genuine choices to make), but the Native American aspect lends it substance, and its value in any case lies in the forging of family ties. The gently adventurous story nips along at a good pace for middle-grade readers.
A quick and enjoyable sortie into the world of preteen family friendships and escapades.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5434-5422-2
Page Count: 74
Publisher: XlibrisUS
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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