A religious, slightly more grounded take on the teenage vampire love story.
In Whittam’s debut novel, a teenage girl rushes into marriage with her best guy friend after a brief romance with a vampire leaves her pregnant.
Kara moves with her family from Phoenix to a small Arizona town after graduating from high school in 1963. On the first night in her new home, she meets devilishly handsome Nate, who saves her from a javelina as she searches for her dog. The attraction between Kara and Nate is immediate, and the two begin to date, but their relationship quickly hits a few snags: Nate won’t go to church with Kara on Sundays, and he wants her to stay with him instead of going to college in the fall. And he happens to be a vampire. Shocked, Kara asks for time to think over their future together, to which he concedes. Nate’s hotheaded brother, Josh, however, flies into a rage at the news and attacks Kara, sending her to the hospital. Kara decides to end her relationship with Nate but not before making love to him. Kara’s Bible in hand, Nate leaves on a journey of redemption, while Kara moves on and begins college. The novel seems to subscribe to the same message of abstinence found in genre heavy-hitter Twilight because Kara soon realizes her first and only night of passion left her pregnant. But unlike Bella, Kara has enough sense to forgo the life of murderous urges that Nate would offer her. She writes to her friend Fred for advice, and he proposes marriage to avoid a scandal. Their newlywed bliss is cut short when Fred is shipped off to Vietnam, and the two are forced to deal with the very human stress of being separated by war. The novel certainly recycles many recent vampire themes: Stalking is considered a romantic gesture when committed by an undead hunk. But in a healthy twist, Nate finds motivation to stay clean that isn’t Kara, even if that plotline comes off a bit bland or preachy at times.
A religious, slightly more grounded take on the teenage vampire love story.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0615927152
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Kathleen Whittam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2015
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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