Clunky prose and long-winded dissertations on comparative religion can’t impede the breathless momentum of the Demon-Drop...
A convicted murderer who may be a latter-day Messiah wants to donate his heart to the sister of one of his victims, in Picoult’s frantic 15th (Nineteen Minutes, 2007, etc.).
Picoult specializes in hot-button issues. This latest blockbuster-to-be stars New Hampshire’s first death-row inmate in decades, Shay Bourne, a 33-year-old carpenter and drifter convicted of murdering the police officer husband of his employer, June, and her seven-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. Eleven years later Shay is still awaiting execution by lethal injection. Suddenly, miracles start to happen around Shay—cell-block tap water turns to wine, an AIDS-stricken fellow inmate is cured, a pet bird and then a guard are resurrected from the dead. Shay’s spiritual adviser, Father Michael, is beginning to believe that Shay is a reincarnation of Christ, particularly when the uneducated man starts quoting key phrases from the Gnostic gospels. Michael hasn’t told Shay that he served on the jury that condemned him to death. June’s daughter Claire, in dire need of a heart transplant, is slowly dying. When Shay, obeying the Gnostic prescription to “bring forth what is within you,” offers, through his attorney, ACLU activist Maggie, to donate his heart, June is at first repelled. Practical obstacles also arise: A viable heart cannot be harvested from a lethally injected donor. So Maggie sues in Federal Court to require the state to hang Shay instead, on the grounds that his intended gift is integral to his religious beliefs. Shay’s execution looms, and then Father Michael learns more troubling news: Shay, who, like Jesus, didn’t defend himself at trial, may be innocent.
Clunky prose and long-winded dissertations on comparative religion can’t impede the breathless momentum of the Demon-Drop plot.Pub Date: March 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7434-9674-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
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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