A tender portrayal of those left behind in the wake of tragedy.
Mapson’s quirky, character-driven novels (The Owl & Moon Café, 2006, etc.) explore loneliness under the big skies of the West, and this effort is no exception as a young widow rebuilds her life on her Central California farm.
Though Glory Solomon’s husband died almost a year ago, she still sits in the closet with his clothes and cries. At least she has the animals to keep her going: goats and chickens, abandoned horses and two rescue dogs she is training for adoption. To help make ends meet she is using the farm as a wedding venue—her late husband Dan built a chapel on the property, which also boasts Solomon’s Oak, an ancient white oak that draws tourists and botanists from all over. Coupled with Glory’s cooking skills, the whole wedding thing just may save her from working another day at Target. And then along comes Juniper McGuire, a 14-year-old foster kid Glory hesitantly agrees to take in. She and Dan used to foster-parent boys, and under Dan’s gentle tutelage they became kind young men, but Glory’s not sure she can handle Juniper, an angry girl with facial piercings and a bluebird tattooed on her neck. But then a kind of fate intervenes as she discovers who Juniper is: Juniper’s older sister Casey was famously abducted four years earlier while walking her new dog—a rescue Glory herself gave the family and who made its way back to Glory’s farm the day of the kidnapping. When Juniper meets Cadillac again, the two become inseparable, and Glory thinks this relationship may save the girl from her own destruction. Despite school trouble with Juniper, Glory’s life is slowly improving—the chapel is getting more bookings and she meets Joseph Vigil, a former cop (living with chronic pain from a shooting that took his partner) who came to photograph Solomon’s Oak and has stuck around to help tutor Juniper. Mapson’s three damaged souls, and the ghosts in their lives, are able to find in each other just the thing to make life worth living.
A tender portrayal of those left behind in the wake of tragedy.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60819-330-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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