Emotional, doom-tinged and spooky, with two deeply flawed heroines.
In this romantic thriller, mysterious convergences link two lives separated by 100 years.
In 1996, after her reputation, marriage, career as a TV journalist, and relationship with her adult son, Chad, are trashed, Morgan Reed starts over in Milltown, Pa., a village in beautiful Bucks County. She feels drawn there, particularly to the 200-year-old former rectory that she buys. In 1895, Evangeline Laury, minister’s wife and mother to a small boy, feels stifled in provincial Milltown. She misses the cultured life she’d led in Philadelphia and her painting, especially when she learns that a local American impressionist, the charismatic Daniel Duvall, is giving lessons. As Morgan, with the help of her handsome but mercurial neighbor Victor, works on a documentary about 1895 Milltown, she uncovers more spooky parallels between her life and Evangeline’s. Both women, desperate for love and connection, are guiltily caught between competing attractions and responsibilities, whether for a husband, lover, child or work, and both women will experience the tragic death of someone close. In her debut novel, Barton writes lush descriptions of beauty and desire, with interesting historical details, many of which seem borrowed from real-life American impressionist painter Daniel Garber and his Bucks County studio at Cuttalossa Farm. (Black-and-white historical photos in the book go uncredited.) Though the narrative works to account for Morgan’s needy self-pity and Evangeline’s blind desire, readers might feel less sympathy than the writer intends, especially since other characters pay the ultimate price for the women’s culpability. In particular, deeply emotional Evangeline’s self-punishing guilt becomes internal melodrama. When Victor very reasonably objects to involving sullen, hard-drinking Chad on the documentary project, it’s a welcome moment of sensibleness: “It is not my problem to save your son.”
Emotional, doom-tinged and spooky, with two deeply flawed heroines.Pub Date: June 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-0615687421
Page Count: 394
Publisher: Blue Heron Press
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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