Compassionate coming-of-age novel replete with colorful Southern characters and charm.
In this debut work of fiction, Grace Stevens, a promising piano player from a struggling family, goes on a journey of love and loss before making her way back home to the foothills of east Tennessee.
Growing up in the 1960s in Grantville, a small mill town in Tennessee, Grace loves to play the piano, thumping out tunes by ear. Her mother, Arlene, her aunt Doris and her beloved Grammie decide that Grace must get piano lessons from the affluent widow, former Richmond belle and one-time classical pianist who lives in a gracious mansion in the rich part of town. Grace’s father, Hoyt, objects to this idea, preferring to spend cash on a rifle or booze, so the women scrape together the money in secret. While initially crushed by her teacher’s pronouncement that she must unlearn all her bad habits and begin anew, Grace becomes a diligent student, earning the admiration and patronage of “Miss Bertie” and eventually a music scholarship to attend Vanderbilt University in Nashville. At college, Grace forges an unlikely friendship with her privileged roommate, expands her horizons as a pianist for hire, and engages in a romance that further pushes her into her family’s legacy of alcohol abuse. By novel’s end, Grace reconnects to her talent, treasures the network of support she’s blessed with and builds a new life for herself back in Grantville. Debut author Walker infuses a rich Southern flavor into what is certainly a heartfelt tale. First-person narrator Grace is in the tradition of such wise-child observers as Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) and the eponymous heroine in Kaye Gibbons’ Ellen Foster (1987). While her derailment from her music studies is somewhat disappointing, and the cause for it rather clichéd, Grace’s realization of what’s really important, and her appreciation of the roles that others have played in her life, is truly touching and transcendent. Unlike many authors working in the genre, Walker also conveys nuanced sympathy for her male characters beside an emphasis on sustaining sisterhood.
Compassionate coming-of-age novel replete with colorful Southern characters and charm.Pub Date: March 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-0615954325
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Frances Walker
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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
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