There are just enough flashes of suspense to hold out promise for the next in the projected series.
In his fiction debut, Máté (The Hills of Tuscany, 1998, etc.) writes about two consuming interests: sailing, and Canada’s Kwakiutl Indians. There’s also a pasted-on plot involving a rescue mission.
Dugger, the protagonist, is salvaging logs off a wretched coastal town in British Columbia when he rescues an unmanned ketch and becomes its new owner. The ketch is his pride and joy, but Dugger has another love interest, the married Katherine Hay, whom he once taught to sail. She’s little more than a generic tease, a siren, but she’s Dugger’s obsession, and when he’s offered good money to rescue her from two escaped Kwakiutl convicts, he jumps at the chance. He will head north to uncharted islands, searching for their canoe. His crew consists of his old friend Nello (Italian father, Kwakiutl mother) and a teenaged Chinese cook; the one passenger is Katherine’s husband. Apparently, all this takes place after World War I. Máté is as vague about dates as he is about Dugger’s checkered past; characterization takes a back seat to the challenge of the sea. Here, Máté does a good job, tracking the ketch through perilous storms and fogs; there’s an extraordinary description of Dugger rescuing dying Chinese from a stricken tramp steamer. That, however, is a flashback. The mission, slow to start, lacks a clean narrative line, bogging down in complications. Their passenger proves to be an imposter, who may be in cahoots with a Japanese sharpshooter bearing down on them in a tug. The author works in his knowledge of the Kwakiutl once the ketch reaches Nello’s old village in time for the potlatch, an ancient gift-giving ceremony that degenerates into cannibalism before armed white men show up. By the end, there have been so many deaths and resurrections that the tale has lost all credibility.
There are just enough flashes of suspense to hold out promise for the next in the projected series.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-920256-49-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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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