A desultory chronicle that’s a far cry from the passion of Deafening.
On her deathbed, an old woman recalls her life in this latest from the Canadian Itani (Deafening, 2003, etc.).
Lucky Georgie: She’s off to London to see the Queen. The 80-year-old Canadian widow was born on the same day as Elizabeth and, along with 98 other randomly selected guests, has been invited to a celebratory lunch at Buckingham Palace. But leaving her house in Ontario, Georgie mishandles her car, which sails into a ravine. She is thrown free and lands on her back, badly injured, but with a memory clear enough to give us her life story. It’s an odd frame, which might not matter if her story were more interesting. Georgie has always been a staunch monarchist, and she talks to Lilibet (the Queen’s childhood name) in her head. She has also had a lifelong interest in bones, which began when she discovered Gray’s Anatomy and fell in love with the illustrations. She never knew its owner—her grandfather the doctor, who was killed in World War I—but her grandmother, a midwife, was a strong righteous presence in her life, unlike her gloomy, withdrawn father, who owned a dry-goods store in the small town of Wilna Creek. It’s the women who stand out here, whether Georgie’s mother Phil, now a vigorous centenarian, or her driven daughter Case, who started her own theater in town. Georgie did have a long and generally happy marriage to Harry, a jeweler, despite his dark moods and a disastrous American honeymoon (the novel’s only other dramatic moment). But there was nothing vivid about him, and he clammed up completely in the months before his death from cancer. Georgie herself is strangely absent from her own life. There was no money for medical school, so she made do with helping out in the store and being a good wife and mother. “It’s been a privilege” is her clichéd conclusion.
A desultory chronicle that’s a far cry from the passion of Deafening.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-87113-978-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
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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