Tula Springs is always worth a visit, but this is minor Wilcox.
The gently mad inhabitants of fictional Tula Springs are doing what they do best—minding one another’s business—in the sly Louisiana author’s amiable eighth outing.
Old acquaintances from Modern Baptists (1983), North Gladiola (1985), and elsewhere pop up intermittently in a ramshackle narrative that revolves around the appealing figure of middle-aged Lou(ise) Jones. She’s a former college music-teacher now underemployed (but better paid) as receptionist at the local Christian health club WaistWatch—and unhappily separated from loving husband Don, who’s guarding his parents’ home from an untrustworthy tenant and a belligerent lesbian couple, among others. The story meanders along introducing folks who swim into the Jones’s orbit, including Lou’s overachieving housemaid Alpha (a pivotal figure who never appears), Alpha’s supernaturally fastidious American-African mother Mrs. Ompala, Lou’s pot-smoking gal pal Grady Morgen, and her WaistWatch superiors, febrile and neurasthenic Maigrite and muscular Christian workout guru Brother Moodie. Nobody does much more than posture and fret, partial exceptions being pistol-packing tax assessor Mrs. Melvin Tudie and Snopes-like miscreant F.X. Pickens. The plots that more or less engage them all have to do with a hotly contested academic post, an antique dresser, a jealous octogenarian husband stalking his fugitive bride in a golf cart, and Lou’s vacillating fixations on her own manic-depressive marital state, career crises, and family history. It sounds like fun, but isn’t really, because Wilcox jumps from one oddball character and ludicrous situation to another without bothering to develop anything or anyone credibly. The best features of Heavenly Days are its delicious throwaway lines (“ . . . he was too lazy to pick his own nose”) and non sequiturs (when somebody “wants to know if her notes on Hittite phalli are in her top dresser drawer,” it seems a perfectly reasonably thing to say).
Tula Springs is always worth a visit, but this is minor Wilcox.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03247-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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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