The highly praised author of Ordinary People (1976) and Second Heaven (1982) expertly molds another melancholy story of midwestern, middle-class family love and loss. As in Guest's earlier works, the setting is Detroit and Upper Michigan. As the story begins, the Browners—Keith, an English teacher, Annie, his wife, and their children Harry, 13, Jimmy, 12, and Julie, 9—are on vacation in Au Gres on Lake Huron, awaiting the first of Keith's scheduled chemo treatments for a brain tumor that's just been diagnosed. But before treatments can begin, Keith, 38, dies, and the Browner family descends into grief and confusion. Back in Detroit, Annie searches for something more than a minimum- wage job (she had dropped out of college to marry), while the three kids, reacting to their mother's increasing rage and frustration, as well as to their own loss, grow fractious and sullen, then start skipping school and stealing. Annie's sweet younger sister Jess tries to help, but she's got her own troubles: Jess's married lover, Ryan, who keeps promising to divorce his alcoholic wife, instead goes back to her after she cripples their nine-year-old daughter in a car accident. Other griefs pile up: The stray cat the family adopted is killed by a car; Jimmy's brand-new bike, for which he'd saved up for two years, is stolen. Annie, frayed and feeling abandoned, flees the melee, going back to Au Gres to reflect on Keith's death; but she returns when Jimmy is nearly blinded in a fishing accident. In the midst of this particular extremity, Guest subtly and persuasively paints the beginning of family healing as each member is called on to perform an errand of love for the others. A fine performance—the children are complex and delightful, the emotion direct and compelling—though the story is a sad and gloomy one. (Literary Guild main selection; author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-345-40904-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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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