A middling entertainment, with some nice passages to scare pacifists and arachnophobes.
A variant reading of the Dixie Chicks’ “Hey Earl”—save that we’re in the medieval Welsh marches, not a trailer park, and the victim is of less noble rank.
Young Elise experiences visions that “came unbidden, mostly eluding interpretation” and “often featured absolute strangers,” which makes her husband, nasty old Maelgwyn, sorely wroth. He expresses his displeasure by beating her, which is a very bad idea: debut novelist Guill shows us straightaway that Elise is a survivor who knows her way around weapons. Maelgwyn thus finds his way to the bottom of a Welsh river, while Elise and her servant skedaddle. As befits good Celts, the two women are tough but tender and ever so resourceful; they survive a stalker, narrowly escape visiting the bottom of a river themselves, and live through assorted other torments, only to go into the boutique business—for, as Elise says, “My servant can’t speak, but she’s a wonder at diminishing pains of the head, at chasing wrinkles and women’s monthly complaints, and easing a hundred other ills,” while Elise herself is a whiz at whipping up wart creams, perfumes, and assorted home remedies. Alas, our heroine’s heart is wounded still. But it’s nothing another resourceful Celt, the dispossessed nobleman Gwydion, can’t cure: “I want you to need me, madwoman, as much as I need you,” he murmurs, and urgent kisses and bodices go a-flying. Guill’s confection is pleasant and mostly believable, even if her medieval women have unusually modern concerns and her characters are wont to break out into speech befitting Long John Silver (“But mayhap you yammer like a jaybird when you scrape jowls with fancier folk than me”); and as it progresses, the romance takes on some nice complications, for Maelgwyn is dead but not forgotten, and there’s lots of maiming, hacking, and other pastimes of the day to keep the narrative hopping.
A middling entertainment, with some nice passages to scare pacifists and arachnophobes.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-6479-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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