An eccentric tale about a misleading relationship that burns bright and fast.
Stair (Food and Mood, 2016) offers a novel, based on a true story, about a medical student who flees to Los Angeles to escape the pressures of her everyday life.
Becka is an ambitious and promising young medical student. Halfway through her second year, she and her male roomie, Chase, both begin to crack under the pressures of school. Chase accuses Becka of being a prostitute and believes that she’s bugged the apartment, while Becka struggles with bulimia and a recent breakup. On the verge of a breakdown, she impulsively quits medical school and flies to Los Angeles. On her first day there, she meets an alluring man on the street named King. He says that he’s a lawyer in the process of moving, and that’s why he sleeps in an empty house with no furniture. He also claims to be a minimalist who loves living off the land, so he bathes in the ocean, forages through dumpsters for food and clothes, and rejects medicine as a dangerous crutch. Becka is deeply attracted to King’s free-spirited lifestyle despite having recurring doubts about his background. She finds that he gives her new vitality, and she gets back in shape and conquers her bulimia while with him. But when she finally tracks down King’s history, she finds that he’s far from what he seems. Stair writes in a conversational, evenly paced, and easy-to-follow manner. However, this is an incredibly bizarre tale that she says is based on her own story, with several fictionalized elements. Although Becka’s behavior seems meant to highlight a mental breakdown, Stair writes surprisingly little about the character’s mental health or what drives her to stay with King, and the reader may find it difficult to understand Becka as a result. Still, the author builds the momentum and suspense leading to the explosive and unpredictable ending, when Becka finally discovers King’s true identity, and the reader will likely be as shocked as Becka is.
An eccentric tale about a misleading relationship that burns bright and fast.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-984032-95-9
Page Count: 294
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 9, 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
BOOK REVIEW
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