First-timer Graham crosses lust with New Age longings in a hybrid-romance about a violinist who wins her man only after she dies. In Flint Hills, Kansas, Ethan Brown is called —Wordsworth— because he studied at Yale and has an extensive library in his law office downtown. Divorced, estranged from his teenaged son, and a little lonely despite his engagement to Katie Anne Mackey, daughter of the area’s most imposing cattle rancher, Ethan keeps his spirits up by focusing on his plan to start his own ranch adjoining the Mackeys——until, that is, he meets the new woman in town, Annette Zeldin, a now-famous violinist who left Kansas two decades ago, married, divorced, then stayed in Paris to raise a daughter and become —Europeanized.— The locals scoff at her, and at her daughter’s French accent, but Ethan is mesmerized by her depth and beauty—qualities lacking in the brash Katie Anne. Annette is in town to bury her mother before leaving forever, but her attraction to Ethan, who can quote Yeats to her on command, convinces her to stay. The mutual attraction is so strong that Ethan breaks his engagement and Annette turns her back on Paris to be a housewife in the Kansas hills. But when Katie Anne announces that she’s pregnant, Ethan feels honor-bound to marry her—and, soon after the wedding, a fire courses through the Mackeys’ and Ethan’s land, killing Annette and burning Katie Anne beyond recognition. As Annette’s spirit follows her mother toward heaven, she realizes that her love for her daughter necessitates that she remain bound to the world of the living: so she inhabits the body of her fellow burn victim, Ethan’s wife Katie Anne. The lovers are together at last—but will Ethan, now revolted by the sight of Katie Anne, ever realize that the woman he loves is inside his wife’s disfigured body? Graham’s body-switch gimmick is certainly a weird one, but her unabashed passion for cowboys, French wine, and all things romantic may win her an enthusiastic following. (First printing of 150,000; Literary Guild Main selection; $400,000 ad/promo; author tour before publication)
Pub Date: July 20, 1998
ISBN: 0-399-14404-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
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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