A misstep in a fine writer’s otherwise impressive career. Wait for Graver’s next one.
Graver’s earnest third novel (after The Honey Thief, 1999, etc.) records the ordeals, and multiple “awakenings,” of a family tested by incurable childhood illness.
Narrator Anna Simon initially describes part of a summer she spends at upstate New York’s Camp Luna with her husband Ian Shea, adolescent son Adam, and nine-year-old Max, a sufferer from Xeroderma Pigmentosum (“Hypersensitivity to ultraviolet light”). The Camp, which serves similarly afflicted children and their families, is financed and run by Hal, an energetic widower to whom the overburdened and exhausted Anna (whose career as an artist has of necessity been put on hold) soon finds herself attracted. The plot is thus both predictable and minimal, moving toward its crisis when the Sheas return to Luna a year later and Anna succumbs to her infatuation. It’s expanded by numerous flashbacks to her childhood and later. But Graver’s heart doesn’t seem to be in them: many begin vividly, but quickly dissipate—a partial exception being the account (a foreshadowing, as it turns out) of her year teaching in France and acquiring a duplicitous lover. Anna’s “awakening” to passion with the equally undependable Hal stimulates Max’s grasp at the rudiments of an independent life—and a rift in her marriage that seems about to be repaired by the end. Awake is precisely and sensitively written, but we feel we know exactly where it’s headed almost from the opening pages. Max is a charming and potentially strong character, but Graver’s virtually exclusive focus on Anna’s emotions leaches the drama out of the story. Furthermore, any novel about adults dealing with gravely ill children risks comparison with Stanley Elkin’s black-comic masterpiece The Magic Kingdom, next to which Awake feels very much like unusually literate soap opera.
A misstep in a fine writer’s otherwise impressive career. Wait for Graver’s next one.Pub Date: April 7, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-6540-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
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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