The competing styles—chatty friendships, shopping, middle-aged enlightenment and crime/suspense—make for a disjointed read.
British author Green (The Beach House, 2008, etc.) has moved from England to Connecticut, and her novel’s heroines have fallen suit.
Exit the chippy London career girl looking for love and a sample sale, enter the New England mother questioning whether there is a bit more to life than the requisite diamond-stud earrings and showcase country house. This is what Kit wondered before she divorced Adam, but now two years later, she is finally fulfilled. The mansion, and the prestige of being married to one of Wall Street’s players, is gone. Still, in Highfield (think Greenwich), the mansion has been replaced with a charming house a few blocks from Main Street, and she now has an eccentric and perfectly indispensable new neighbor in octogenarian Edie. Best yet, she has a great job as personal assistant to Robert McClore (think Tom Clancy). The kids have adjusted, her friends Charlie and Tracy are lovely. In fact, everything is terrific. Until it isn’t. There are clouds on the horizon: America’s financial crisis is about to hit this community hard; Tracy begins to woo Robert (his first wife, a wild-child model, died in a boating accident—or was it?— in the swinging ’70s); and Annabel, a British half-sister Kit has just found out about, shows up. Green’s novel begins lightly and then shifts gears, producing a kind of thriller-lite effect. A few key players have some nasty intentions, and Kit has to sort it all out. Meanwhile, she is trying to decide if her new romantic interest (the dishy Steve, who is literally too good to be true) can compare with Adam, whom she is beginning to think she still loves. Green has some good fun with the shallow lifestyles of the ladies who lunch, and by the end the greedy are punished and the good (that would be Kit) prevail.
The competing styles—chatty friendships, shopping, middle-aged enlightenment and crime/suspense—make for a disjointed read.Pub Date: June 16, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02086-7
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
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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