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MY FATHER HAD A DAUGHTER

Name: MY FATHER HAD A DAUGHTER
Author: Grace Tiffany
ISBN: 0-425-19003-X

JUDITH SHAKESPEARE’S TALE

by Grace Tiffany ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 6, 2003

Engaging enough to whet the appetite of those readers unfamiliar with Shakespeare’s family life and times, but there’s no...

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Shakespeare is hot, a fact shown not long ago by the success of Shakespeare In Love. Now Tiffany debuts with a strange little fantasy spotlighting the Bard’s daughter Judith.

Shakespeare had three children by Anne Hathaway: first Susanna, then the twins Judith and Hamnet, Hamnet dying, from unknown causes, while a child. Author Tiffany, English professor and Shakespearean specialist, has invented a drowning for him to launch her tale. The boy is Judith’s ideal playmate in their wildly imaginative games, while in the background is their volatile mother, chafing at William’s long absences in London, which so distress Hamnet that Judith casts a spell to bring her father home. The spell calls for dunking themselves in the Avon, which causes Hamnet’s accidental drowning. Judith is overwhelmed by guilt, then by rage at her father after finding a discarded scroll of Twelfth Night. She concludes he’s exploiting Hamnet’s death: and this calls for his exposure, and for her public atonement. So, at 14, Judith steals away to London. Still flat-chested, she changes into boy’s clothes, finds a job at a tavern, and lands a bit part with her father’s company. All this happens with a dreamlike ease, a fast pace and a jaunty tone helping mask the many improbabilities. When the older boy actor Nathan Field threatens to expose her as a girl, she buys his silence by sacrificing her virginity, all in a day’s work for this bold lass. She then tricks Nathan out of the part of Viola and has her moment of glory at the Globe before her father recognizes her and returns her to Stratford. The great adventure of Judith’s life now over, the story runs out of steam: Its final third covers her quiet life back home and marriage, years later, to a local vintner.

Engaging enough to whet the appetite of those readers unfamiliar with Shakespeare’s family life and times, but there’s no meat here for the more sophisticated.

Pub Date: May 6, 2003

ISBN: 0-425-19003-X

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Berkley

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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CHARADE

by Sandra Brown ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 2, 1994

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The queen of Texas melodrama takes metaphor perhaps a step too far as she pits her heart-transplant-patient heroine against a serial killer obsessed with stopping her new heart. Having as a child survived Hodgkin's disease, her parents' double suicide, and life in a series of substandard foster homes, feisty redhead Cat Delaney is more than able to wisecrack her way through a heart transplant operation at the peak of her career. Famous as a star of the television soap opera Passages, Cat experiences both a literal and figurative change of heart after her surgery, abruptly opting to drop her acting career, move to San Antonio, and create a local news segment aimed at matching abandoned children with good adoptive homes. She breaks off an affair with Dr. Dean Spicer, her wealthy cardiologist, and falls madly in love with Alex Pierce (``His tongue was nimble, his appetite carnal''), a Houston cop turned mystery writer whose sudden appearance in her life may not be coincidental. When newspaper articles describing murders of other heart transplantees begin appearing in Cat's mailbox, she realizes she's being stalked by a lunatic obsessed with stilling the heart of a loved one who may or may not be her donor. As the anniversary of Cat's transplant nears, the threat of violence grows greater. But from which direction comes the danger?: From her hostile secretary, possibly related to a woman who was murdered on the day of her transplant? From the stepfather of one of Cat's orphan clients, whose greatest rival may have been Cat's donor? Or (horrors) from sexy Alex, whose past holds more secrets than she could ever guess? Highly schematic and hastily sketched, this nevertheless provides a satisfying dose of Brown's (Where There's Smoke, 1993, etc.) famously raunchy sex scenes (`` `I want to know I'm with a man. I want to be taken. I want—' `You want to be fucked.' ''), and a certain raw enthusiasm that will no doubt increase her legion of fans. (First printing of 300,000; Literary Guild main selection)

Pub Date: May 2, 1994

ISBN: 0-446-51656-2

Page Count: 432

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE ALCHEMIST

by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

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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.