Lumpish fiction debut by the owner of a D.C. chocolate shop detailing the lives of a middle-aged couple who meet via a suicide prevention hotline and continue to struggle against a nagging desire to end it all. Jo’s woes began when her father committed suicide when Jo was only six and her mother wrapped herself in an impenetrable blanket of denial. Having cared for her mother until her death from cancer, then having moved into the basement of her married sister’s home, Jo began the long march to age 40 as a self-loathing “old troll.” That is, until she called the Hotline Heaven suicide prevention number and found Monk on the other phone. A divorced former stock-car racer still grieving over the death of his young son, Monk turns out to have a knack for relieving Jo’s pain. The two arrange a meeting, fall in love at first sight, marry, and eventually settle down in tiny Canterbury, Pennsylvania. “Happily ever after” proves not to be a phrase in their emotional vocabularies, however: Even as Monk is promoted twice by his employer, a home improvement chain called Home-Mart, and even as Jo finds a satisfying creative outlet as baker at The Cake & Coffee, depression stalks them both. When Monk is fired from his job, he runs his car into a ditch; his near-death experience convinces him there’s no life after death and therefore no reason for hope in this one. When The Cake & Coffee is singled out for a feature article in Hearthstone, the pressure on Jo to create a cake good enough to grace the magazine’s cover takes the pleasure out of baking for her. Husband and wife suffer through this rough patch, empathetic yet too wounded to help each other. It takes a new job offer and a perfect cake to life their spirits, allowing these two aging lovers to stagger through another year. Park strives for lyricism in depicting the lives of this more-or-less average small-town couple, but too often her prose dissolves into sentimental murk.
Pub Date: July 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-57962-011-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
