Topical family melodrama.
Married Bay Area woman tries to overcome a fraught relationship with her troubled teenage stepdaughter.
Mr. Right can come with big-time baggage, and that is certainly the case for interior designer Andi. Already in her late 30s when she meets and falls for divorced dad Ethan, Andi wants nothing more than to start a family of her own with him. A doting father to his two young daughters, Sophia and Emily, Ethan shares custody of them with his ex-wife Janice, a bitter, unreliable alcoholic. Sophia, ten year’s old when the story begins, adores her cool new stepmom, but 17-year-old goth princess Emily is a different story. A master of manipulation and histrionics, Emily sees Andi as a major threat in a battle for Ethan’s love. She manages to twist her overly permissive dad around her little finger—to Andi’s dismay—and acts out by experimenting with drugs and sex. Struggling with fertility issues, Andi is secretly thrilled, though, when Emily is revealed to be 7 months pregnant from one of her random hookups. Hoping that Emily will give the child to her and Ethan, she is then crushed when Ethan insists Emily give it up for adoption. Emily has other plans, of course, and gives birth to a healthy boy, Callum. But motherhood turns out to be more than she can handle, and she runs off to Portland. Andi is left to raise Cal as her own for three happy years, knowing in the back of her mind that Emily might someday return. Away from home, Emily gets a job on an organic farm and manages to clean up her act. She also repairs her relationship with Janice, who has stopped drinking, and reconnects with her childhood pal Michael, who has grown into quite a hunk. The two of them decide to move back to Mill Valley, with Emily insisting to an ecstatic Ethan and a skeptical Andi that she only wants to be a part of Cal’s life. But does she mean it, and has she really changed? Green (Promises to Keep, 2010, etc.) ramps up the emotional stakes by presenting both Andi and Emily’s points of view, even as her prose is a bit on the dull and repetitive side.
Topical family melodrama.Pub Date: March 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-59182-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
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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