You would have to be deaf to miss the John Millington Synge in Cady’s twanging, Twain-like tall tale. But you can always...
Uncivil actions at the Hood Canal find an immortal entity dragging cars into the Puget Sound sluice’s wide and dismal depths.
Cady goes phantasmological again, as in Inagehi (1994), which bodied forth the Native American myth of part-human/part-spirit Nunnehi. But the author of The American Writer: Shaping a Nation’s Mind (1999) not only likes to get at the spirit of a region and go for the mytho-cosmic, he also admires giving a good Irish jig to his sentence and each word its winsome whirl in the moonlight. So when a young wreck hauler comes into Bertha’s Beer and Bait, home of pool hustlers, and speaks of the car he’s just hauled out of Hood Canal with a guy and a lady in it, he must say fancifully, “A hell of a thing to do to a Buick.” And then this playboy of the Puget Sound adds, “A’ course it’s busted up a little.” After the pining blacksmith Sugar Bear hammers a hole into the head of an unwholesome man for his nasty remark about virginal young witch Green Annie, he sinks the body deep into Hood Canal, car and all. The lovelorn young witch then makes up wild tales to distract the cops from thinking about the missing man and invents a car-crushingly oversensitive Water Fury that twists Studebakers into love knots. When low rainfall shrinks the canal, the dunked car is exposed but the body is gone. Then the tow-truck kid loses his Ranchero to the Stinking Thing, and a babbling canal fisherman sees the Creature hover and gangle below him like something out of Lovecraft.
You would have to be deaf to miss the John Millington Synge in Cady’s twanging, Twain-like tall tale. But you can always depend on Cady for a full-blooded monster and a big damn contest between good and evil. It’s that Pacific Northwest darkness coursing in his veins, whatever the comedy.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28079-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
