Profound it ain’t, but immensely readable and very charming in its own messy, undisciplined way.
Four generations of strong-minded women battle each other, their individual insecurities and life’s many ups and downs in this overstuffed latest from Mapson (Goodbye, Earl, 2004, etc.).
The author gives her characters plenty of obstacles to overcome before the mostly happy ending. When we meet Mariah Moon, inching along in traffic on California’s Highway One, she’s just lost her job as assistant sociology professor at a local college. How will she pay for that fancy school attended by her brilliant 12-year-old daughter Lindsay? Waitressing at the Owl & Moon, her family’s Pacific Grove restaurant, is the short-term solution, but it means dealing with her cranky, ultra-religious grandmother, Gammy, and her maddening mother, Allegra. Mariah is mortified by Allegra still dressing and acting like a hippie chick at nearly 50, and she’s never forgiven her mother for refusing to identify the man who begot her 34 years ago. (Mariah at least told Lindsay the name of her absent father, even if the girl’s never met him.) Not to worry: When Allegra has a fainting spell that sends her to the hospital, the doctor who hands her a diagnosis of leukemia is none other than Alvin Goodnough, the Vietnam vet en route to med school with whom she shared a sleeping bag back in the Summer of Love. Will they finally get together for keeps? Can Mariah get over her eternal adolescent snit with the help of a handsome Scottish customer at the café? Will Lindsay’s science project win her a scholarship, or land her in jail? Mapson’s plotting is as over-the-top as it was in the Bad Girl Creek trilogy—Phoebe DeThomas’s daughter Sally turns up from that series to befriend Lindsay—and the twists are often blindingly obvious, poorly motivated, or both. What saves the story is the characters: broadly drawn, but utterly human, full of querulous life and irritatingly believable. The author loves the people she creates and draws in readers to share her affection.
Profound it ain’t, but immensely readable and very charming in its own messy, undisciplined way.Pub Date: July 4, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-6641-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
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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