A well-told story of one woman’s life, with appealing supernatural undercurrents.
Lee, in her debut novel, fictionalizes the story of her English grandmother’s life.
In the early 20th century in Church Stretton, Shropshire, England, Mary Eileen, nicknamed Mollie, lives with her brothers, Les and Fred, and their loving parents. Although generally content, she wishes her legs weren’t quite so short; as she and her peers mature, her girlfriends find boyfriends, but Mollie remains unattached. During World War II, she takes on the local milk route, earning the nickname of “Mollie the Milk” and enduring good-natured teasing about finding her “cream.” She spies young soldier Jack Meredith home on leave, and, one day, he invites her for a drink. They soon marry, but after Jack leaves, he does not return from the battlefield. She meets another suitor, mechanic Bill Cooke, and is initially hesitant, but she heeds the advice from her mum, who asks her, “[H]ow many nice, down-to-earth and unmarried Shropshire lads do you expect to meet?” After marrying again, Mollie begins to raise a family, encountering joy and heartbreak. As her life goes on, she finds simple pleasures in her collectibles, her grandchildren, and her seemingly supernatural connection to nature and spirits—including communion with fairies. This first-person tale is a loving and heartfelt tribute to Lee’s grandmother, drawing upon Mollie’s history and bringing her thoughts to life in an upbeat, chatty manner. Despite occasional unclear phrasing, the story flows well. Mollie is a spunky character, given to flights of fancy, while those in her orbit seem more like framed photos on a mantelpiece. The book’s final third, however, focuses primarily on Mollie’s physical and mental decline; the theme of cancer figures predominantly in this section, and it’s given voice in an inspiring manner.
A well-told story of one woman’s life, with appealing supernatural undercurrents.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2013
ISBN: 978-3952420508
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Katherine Anne Lee
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 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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