An innocent and mild-mannered boy grows up fast and ugly as his choice of friends sucks him into another family’s self-destructive tailspin: a relentlessly hardscrabble debut. In the northern reaches of rural Vermont, where dirt roads are fast tracks for renegades and every house and trailer hides a tragedy, 16-year-old Jessup is simply trying to come to terms with a first awkward romance. After going the whole season without kissing the girl who was a summer visitor, he’s now left with fishing and daydreaming to occupy his time. All that changes, however, on the day when Reg nearly runs him over as Jessup is trying to hitch a ride after his bike breaks down. Reg is older, a hard-driving, hard-drinking, hard-nosed ex-con with a big marijuana harvest to haul out of the mountains and a grudge against a local pair of brothers who are also in the cultivation business and whom he blames for sending him to prison. He gives Jessup a ride to remember, first introducing him to his family: wheelchair-bound Hal, a weight-guessing barker at county fairs; and Marigold, whose married life hasn't been the same since her logger husband lopped off a piece of his equipment with the chainsaw. Hal and Reg get Jessup so stoned, drunk, and dizzy that he’s sick. Then Marigold comes on to him, and when the night is over the boy hardly knows who he is anymore. Worse, the dark side to Reg is swiftly triggered when, in his cabin, he finds a cousin all shot up amid the pot plants. He hatches a malevolent plan, with Jessup’s unwitting aid, that’s somewhere between suicidal and just crazy. When the smoke clears, Jessup is battered, traumatized by all he’s seen, and utterly alone. Absent fathers are the supposed reason for this whole misadventure. Maybe, but the characters move at the speed of light toward rack and ruin, and the psychology can't keep up.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-670-88517-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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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