The kind of uninspired melodrama seen on made-for-TV movies.
A pallid debut of revenge and redemption as a woman grieves the death of her young son.
Ellen Banks lives a fairly typical American life—she’s a divorced working mother of two boys, with a dog, a cat and a nice old house in Madison, Wisc. During the summer, the three vacation at college friends Anna and Sam’s lake house, and it’s there one August that all normality is destroyed. While playing in the water, 11-year-old James is accidentally hit by a teenager on a Jet Ski. Rushed to the hospital, James is alive, but the doctors warn that with a head trauma, the next 48 hours will reveal his true condition. A good portion of the story takes place in the hospital as Ellen is tormented by her son’s dire condition, but the drama is nonexistent. The reader knows James will die, and the emotional landscape is sadly generic—Ellen is numb, enraged, helpless, and her conversations with friends and family are the stuff of TV medical dramas. After James’s death, Ellen carries on with life, though there are noticeable fissures—her relationship with older son Daniel cools as he learns to fend for himself, she loses weight and becomes unfocused and eschews the kind attentions of Bob Hansen, the attorney prosecuting the case. The two begin dating, but Ellen shies away when she considers that their relationship would be built on the death of her son. Eventually, Ellen pins all her hopes of emotional recovery on the trial to convict the teen who ran into James. Her need for revenge is unquestioned by friends and family (though her mother tries to broach the subject) and the novel glides over the interesting moral issue until Ellen sees light and learns forgiveness. Although the author builds a tender portrait of Ellen and her two boys, particularly the memories she has of James, the story is too predictable and the characterizations too thin to make it engaging or original.
The kind of uninspired melodrama seen on made-for-TV movies.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-48536-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
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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