EAST OF DENVER

Name: EAST OF DENVER
Author: Gregory Hill
ISBN: 978-0-525-95279-4

by Gregory Hill ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 5, 2012

A story about a father and son who bond against the odds, with an ending as quirkily satisfying as the rest of the book.

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You can go home again, but Lord knows why you’d ever want to. Such is the lesson learned by rural drifter Stacey “Shakespeare” Williams in this agreeable, offbeat debut novel.

A deceased cat leads Shakespeare from Denver to his father’s farm, where he hopes to find a suitable burial space. Instead, he finds his father deep into senility, not aware that his longtime caretaker recently dropped dead in his bathroom. He’s also been swindled by the owner of the local bank, who’s already stolen Pa’s beloved airplane and is about to foreclose on the farm. Shakespeare settles in for the long haul, and the people he reconnects with—town bully/drug dealer D.J. Beckman and oversexed bank teller Clarissa McPhail—remind him of why he left. But he spends most of the narrative with his father, once a gifted carpenter/inventor and now in the grip of something that looks like Alzheimer’s. Hill doesn’t soft-pedal the sadness of the situation, even while playing up the father’s constant forgetfulness and quick flashes of coherence for their dry and dark humor. Likewise, a subplot about an old classmate who’s now paraplegic is neither sentimentalized nor played for cheap laughs. The only hole is that we learn almost nothing of Shakespeare’s back story: We find that he is genetically unable to smell, an odd detail that doesn’t bear on the plot, but never find out what he did for a living. Shakespeare eventually decides that his best option is an unrealistic plan to rob the bank; whether he’ll go through with it is a running question throughout the book.

A story about a father and son who bond against the odds, with an ending as quirkily satisfying as the rest of the book.

Pub Date: July 5, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-525-95279-4

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: June 30, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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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

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.