A family tale offers skillful dialogue as well as brisk pacing and an effective resolution.
A woman discovers her mother possesses a secret cottage, unleashing a chain of revelations and realizations in this novel.
Eleanor Williams, called Nell, is confused as well as worried when she gets a call from a Hartland, Vermont, hospital saying that her mother, Mary Ellen Reilly, is in intensive care. Vermont? Her mother lives in Massachusetts. Tense with anxiety, Nell rushes to her still-unconscious mother from her New Jersey home to discover a fresh enigma: Mary owns a cottage in Hartland, filled with photos of her covert life going back 20 years, before Nell’s father died. Already subject to insecurity, Nell feels betrayed, her world crumbling: “Wasn’t Mom’s real life good enough? Why did she need to get away from it?” But as she and her older sister Bridget learn more about the cottage and Mary’s friendship with neighbor Jake Bascomb and his son Adam, Nell realizes that in her own home, she has no personal space. To write in her journal, she has to hide in the bathroom, while her husband has both a home office and a man cave. Nell begins to understand why her mother never mentioned the cottage. And as the novel reveals more about its characters, including the Bascombs, buried family secrets come to light and new understandings are reached. In her book, Cleare (Destined, 2011) constructs a well-written examination of how families affect choices, why people keep secrets, and the need for a room of one’s own. The tale retains a sense of mystery as its revelations spill out; one of the greatest riddles, it turns out, is a parent’s real life, the one not shown to children. Nell’s panic at discovering this helps explain the need for secrecy; it’s never an arbitrary plot obstacle. But some things work out a little too neatly or easily and some depend on wealth; in addition, Nell is agonizingly slow at figuring out she should just speak up for what she wants instead of finding a way to manipulate others or not have to ask. Yet many can relate to her dilemma, if not her privilege.
A family tale offers skillful dialogue as well as brisk pacing and an effective resolution.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-940215-81-5
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Red Adept Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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