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UP FROM ORCHARD STREET

Name: UP FROM ORCHARD STREET
Author: Eleanor Widmer
ISBN: 0-553-80400-6

by Eleanor Widmer ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 26, 2005

Poignant snapshots of a long-lost era and place: Widmer died last year at the age of 80.

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Posthumous first novel offers pungent, nostalgic vignettes of Jewish life on Manhattan’s Lower East Side over the early course of the 20th century.

Matriarch Manya Roth, the narrator’s Bubby, emigrates from Odessa. Her husband dies on the way over from a lung ailment, and she is left to bring up their precocious son, Jack, on slim wages at Greenspan’s bakery. Manya’s fame as a cook spreads. An admirer, a typesetter at the Jewish Forward, sets her up in her own restaurant at 12 Orchard Street, where Manya, Jack and, later, Jack’s wife and two children, will live for the next 30 years. Jack, a dandy with an eye for dressing women stylishly, marries teenaged beauty Lil. He revamps her to look like a fashion model, and Lil eventually gets work as a saleswoman at Saks, though her lungs are scarred fatally from childhood diseases. Life on Orchard Street centers around Yiddish Bubby Manya, with her white hair and fetchingly full figure squeezed into a corset; the narrator accompanies her shopping to gather ingredients for her famous dishes of pickled herring and strudel. The family adopts a young black boy who shows up half-starved one night. They call him Clayton because his real name (Carlton) is too hard to pronounce. Other characters making their way through the author’s childhood memories include beloved Dr. Koronovsky, who leaves the Lower East Side for a golden career uptown but doesn’t neglect to invite Manya and the young narrator to his wedding, and Jack’s friend Rocco, a shoeshiner who “owns” Little Italy and is consulted on the perfect shoes to wear. Eventually, a summer sojourn to the farmland of Connecticut opens the family’s eyes to another way of life, while the advent of the cafeteria on Canal Street forces Manya to alter her old-style restaurant.

Poignant snapshots of a long-lost era and place: Widmer died last year at the age of 80.

Pub Date: July 26, 2005

ISBN: 0-553-80400-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Bantam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE ALCHEMIST

by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

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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.