An unfocused, underdeveloped, unexciting debut.
Old money, environmental activism and large waterfowl collide in the suburbs of Boston.
Wild geese have descended on Eden Rock Country Club, and they’ve excited a discordant array of reactions. The club manager wants them gone, dead or alive. The club chef wants them fat and juicy in time for a big awards banquet. The groundskeeper wants to protect them from poisonous herbicides; he’s adopted a gosling for a pet. And one of the club’s members has descended into an existential funk after accidentally killing one of the birds with a golf ball. Meanwhile, the Eden Rock social scene is just recovering from a broken engagement between two young members, Nina Rundlett and Eliot Farnsworth. Their breakup was engineered by Arietta Wingate, keeper of “the book”: a record of the club’s sexual history, secretly maintained since Eden Rock’s inception and passed down through the generations from one club matriarch to her carefully chosen apprentice. Arietta knows who the real fathers are, and it’s her job to prevent intra-club marriages between partners unaware of their consanguinity. These two plotlines make very odd bedfellows. The plague of geese could have triggered a slapstick romp or a sharp satire. It could have been a black comedy of manners. But it’s neither, and lacks both fizz and bite. Nor does Hart create some other satisfying whole from these disparate pieces. The large cast of characters adds diversity without adding interest. Hart narrates in the third person, but she allows individual voices to color each chapter’s tone, a technique that would have been more successful if her characters weren’t uniformly one-dimensional. Club manager Gerard has no existence beyond Eden Rock; chef Vita thinks of nothing but foie gras and crème fraîche; activist Phoebe seldom spares a thought for anything she can’t protest. They may not be unrealistic—people can, of course, be overworked, food-obsessed and shrilly judgmental—but they certainly are boring.
An unfocused, underdeveloped, unexciting debut.Pub Date: May 15, 2007
ISBN: 0-316-01500-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
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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