Stories that are worth reading twice.
Beauty and youth, desire and privilege are the threads sewing together these seven stories.
Alcott’s protagonists are often beautiful, clever young women from economically impoverished backgrounds who wind up with men many years older and far richer. Estranged from their families of origin and never quite at home with their boyfriends and husbands, these women are ill at ease and even suicidal despite their intelligence and acquired grace, and they must struggle for self-acceptance and independence. In “Natural Light,” the narrator discovers a disturbing photo of her dead mother hanging in a museum, which her father refuses to explain. Separated from her husband, who can’t tolerate her darkness, the woman wonders whether she too might be exempt from answering questions about “who I was or how I suffered.” In “Part of the Country,” the narrator leaves her husband because she believes he likes weak women and only returns to him after she has proved her strength by hurting him. The best stories here are the first and last. In “Emergency,” a group of women who collectively narrate the story excoriates their friend Helen, whose life spirals downward after her rich husband leaves her. “You can’t say whore,” they comment about her “conquests,” “and we would never say whore—well, once we said whore—but you could say without qualms there was trouble.” “Temporary Housing,” which plumbs the deep ties between two self-destructive young women, offers searing commentary on how vulnerable women can be. “Maybe we aren’t girls,” the narrator reflects after learning her childhood friend is dead of an overdose, “surely we were never children, but we might have the talents of animals, sensing everything that wants to kill us, and that we need to kill.” Alcott’s prose is cerebral and knotty, but patience yields exquisite insights about women’s agency and the corrosiveness of male privilege.
Stories that are worth reading twice.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781324051886
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
