From the author of Lily Beach (1993), a pleasant-enough love- cures-all saga set in a Brooklyn neighborhood on the brink of gentrification. Zoe Finney has moved to Park Slope with her six-year-old daughter Rose and her deeply depressed husband Jamie. She's sold the Sutton Place co-op inherited from her husband's ultra-wealthy family and has set out to live her own way. Meantime, poor Jamie lies quasi-catatonic all day, while Zoe pines for sex and comforts herself with compulsive shoplifting. And gets to know her handsome divorced neighbor, Keevan, a sensitive schoolteacher who seduces her with Clue games and the kind of full-throttle adoration that neither her parents nor her husband have given her. Kid-at-heart Keevan also wins the trust and love of troubled little Rose. But some sort of stuff has to happen before the happy trio can sign on for happily ever after. The various salt-of-the-earth types who populate the neighborhood must negotiate some obligatory life crises: The liveliest subplot allows Keevan's bitter sister-in-law Patty to get a makeover, jettison her cheating husband, and discover the joys not only of dating but of cooking with lemongrass; Keevan must cure himself of his suppressed anger at women, which emerged during his first marriage (he knocks this task off with surprising ease); and in order to start loving herself, Zoe must get arrested for shoplifting and learn that Keevan still cares. When Jamie finally snaps out of it, puppy-eyed in his gratitude at Zoe's patience, she must go through some long-winded vacillations between duty and passion before Jamie selflessly decides to renounce her so that, without even having to make a difficult choice, she can be with Keevan. A standard-issue fairy tale, then, rescued from potential dreariness by its likable characters and its nostalgic and vivid rendering of a neighborhood where benign nosiness still reigns.
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-688-14589-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
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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