A provocative, but not picture-perfect, romance novel.
A fragile woman discovers love and lust with her seductive drawing teacher in Gabriel’s (Next to You, 2014, etc.) contemporary romance.
Marie is living apart from her soon-to-be-ex-husband, U.S. Sen. Richard Macintyre. Her best friend, Nishi, gives her drawing lessons for her 30th birthday, and the teacher turns out to be a sexy French artist named Luc Marchand; the lessons take place at Luc’s Colonial-era farmhouse in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. Marie’s father, William, a lobbyist and former senator, and Eileen, her fundraiser mother, want Marie to make up with Richard, in spite of his very public relationship with a new lover. Eileen counsels Marie that “Mistresses rarely become wives.” Before Richard left her, she was a dutiful wife and daughter whose life was purposeful and “black and white”—not gray, like it feels to her now. Luc seduces her out of this gray zone and lets her experience color: “Draw blue,” he says. When she doesn’t understand his request, he kisses her and then pushes her away, explaining, “I wanted to turn off your brain, so you could draw.” But was the kiss really just part of a drawing lesson? A subsequent session features a velvet blindfold and Luc urging Marie to touch his naked body. “What does that feel like?” he asks. “Think how that might look on paper.” It’s no shock that they become lovers, but it is a surprise when Richard calls off the divorce. Marie, now in love with Luc, strategizes a way to make Richard reconsider, but neither her plan nor his subsequent actions ring true. Gabriel does depict flirting well, and she paints white-hot sex scenes. Sensual, flawed Luc’s dialogue and internal monologues are also sharp and unpredictable. That said, readers may find it puzzling what a man like Luc would see in milquetoast Marie, even if she is beautiful, with hair that’s a “mélange of red and brown.” Marie also mumbles, slumps, and thinks that “[s]exy French artists were not interested in women like her.” Surely in the 10-plus years that Luc’s been on the market he could have chosen a woman who doesn’t have “more baggage than a 747.”
A provocative, but not picture-perfect, romance novel.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0692357422
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Serif Books
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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