Actress/author Kagan's (The Girls, 1994) exploration of the fateful ties and traditions that bind women together, for better and sometimes for worse. Eighty-year-old Mollie Ventimiglia, who lives in Kansas City with her third husband Lew, is suffering from senile dementia and declining fast. When Gilliana, Mollie's middle-aged daughter, finds her own marriage in trouble, she decides to escape Los Angeles and head to Mollie and her own childhood home, where she is shocked to find her mother incoherent and Lew exerting every scrap of energy to give her the care she needs. When she quits L.A., Gilliana leaves not just her husband behind but 17-year-old-daughter Clare, who is naturally worried about both her parents' marriage and her grandmother's questionable health. But Clare is not her mother's, or her grandmother's, daughter for nothing; in Gilliana's absence, she grits her teeth and stays on good terms with her troubled dad, contemplates and then decides against having sex with her boyfriend, and searches for a theme for her college application essays. Meanwhile, back in Kansas, Lew and Gilliana have to decide what to do with Mollie, and Gilliana has to decide what steps to take in her own life. Over the course of the present-day narrative, Mollie and Gilliana's personal histories (and failed romances) emerge; Mollie's WW II wedding to a dashing gambler (Gilliana's father), and Gilliana's passionate affair with famous comic Anthony Ronzoni—whose untimely death left her irrevocably scarred—give Clare (who is sent for by Gilliana and present at Mollie's eventual death) insight into her own life, and help give Gilliana, on whom everybody else's fate hinges, the strength to make the decisions she has no choice but to make. Nonsensical title and strained historical references aside, an undeniable poignancy colors Kagan's attempt to show three generations of women coming to terms with each other at the end of a life. (Literary Guild selection)
Pub Date: April 12, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-43598-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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