A meandering story, though funny enough in a blasé way, featuring sly asides on everything from the perfidy of men to the...
Love and a nice apartment are hard to find in Manhattan, says this second novel by the author of Going Down (1996).
The daughter of a rich fashion designer, Liv Kellerman never had to work a day in her life—until she left her lawyer husband when he started taking Prozac and stopped having sex with her. Problem is, he owns their apartment. Liv takes a job reading to a blind judge, but she can’t afford the cockroach-infested MacDougal Street walkup she’s found on a salary of eight dollars an hour. So she signs on as a real-estate trainee in a seedy office run by a mannish woman named Dale and is soon earning commissions on various weird lofts and living spaces. Wearying of Dale’s out-loud fantasizing about the young girls she lusts after, Liv moves on to a much more upscale firm, raking in bigger commissions and learning that rich clients can be really strange. (One couple asks whether she’d be interested in donating an egg or two to provide a sibling for their precious tot. She demurs.) Her affair with Andrew Lugar, an eccentric architect who likes to bite during sex, is going nowhere; ditto her divorce. After reading Andrew’s diary, annoyed by his loony, egomaniacal descriptions of their slightly warped romance and by the realization that he never intended to leave his girlfriend, Liv contemplates shooting the jerk. She settles for dumping him after he chomps off her earlobe. Nothing ever comes up roses for this contemporary urban heroine: her soon-to-be-ex is selling their old apartment, she has to show it to buyers who criticize the décor . . . and so on. All this convoluted action would be a lot more compelling, however, if Liz had even half the sexiness and spunk of Bennington Bloom, Going Down’s call-girl heroine
A meandering story, though funny enough in a blasé way, featuring sly asides on everything from the perfidy of men to the purpose of Thanksgiving turkeys.Pub Date: May 7, 2001
ISBN: 1-57322-185-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
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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