Often inconsequential taken alone, the stories build incrementally to create a moving whole.
Ten interconnected tales about a tightknit Ukrainian neighborhood in 1960s Chicago: a first collection from the author of the novel The Sky Unwatched (2000).
Narrator Luba lives with her émigré parents and attends a local college where, eager to assimilate, she uses the name Linda. The first story she tells, “Steve’s Bar,” sets up the community’s generational divisions. Steve’s original patrons, mostly immigrants from DP camps after WWII, look up to officer Kharkevych, the cop they call on to avert neighborhood crises. But their college-age children watching the TV above the bar are nonplussed to see him among the other cops roughing up antiwar protesters from their campus. In “My Black Valiant,” the secondhand car Luba’s purchased, loses its potency as a symbol of rebellion after she catches her parents giggling in it one Sunday morning. “The Celebrity” is a famous Ukrainian poet’s widow whom Luba chauffeurs around in the Valiant. The woman is a money-grubbing phony, but her charisma works genuine magic on Luba and everyone else. A different kind of charisma is at work in “Saint Sonya.” Sonya became briefly famous for bleeding with stigmata during middle school, until Luba told on her for hanging out with boys. Now Sonya works in a bakery and is perfectly content. In “Obligation,” a young woman becomes unraveled when she recognizes a bag lady as the person who saved her life as a child in the camps. “Pani Ryhotska in Love” makes Luba jealous that the old woman can find romance with her aging boarder, especially since Luba’s crush on Pani Ryhotska’s artist son is a theme throughout the stories—finding a disillusioning climax in “The Prodigal Son Enters Heaven.” In the final piece, “John Mars, All American,” Luba faces her own ambivalence when she brings a potential suitor to Steve’s Bar, sees her world through his critical non-Ukrainian eyes, and loses interest in him.
Often inconsequential taken alone, the stories build incrementally to create a moving whole.Pub Date: April 11, 2003
ISBN: 1-56512-332-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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