Terrific opening, terrific close, but a bumpy ride in between.
Dark portrait of a High Plains community.
Serial killer traps latest victim! There’s no resisting the power of the opening chapter, told from the viewpoint of the so-called I-90 killer. He’s been visiting pro-Ana Web sites to target anorexic young women. Now he’s closing in on Hayley Jo Zimmerman, a sales clerk in Rapid City, S.D., originally from the small town of Twisted Tree. Posing on the site as an older woman, he’s learned all Hayley Jo’s secrets. They meet face-to-face and he lures her into his Continental before she realizes his identity. Readers hoping for more white-knuckle suspense will be disappointed, for Meyers (The Work of Wolves, 2004, etc.) then shifts gears to begin a ruminative study of Twisted Tree residents, many of whom had contact with Hayley Jo. The author spins a web of relationships, scatters what-ifs and sounds the themes of guilt and innocence. This is a landscape soaked in blood. The first white settler, Old Joe Valen, forced Native Americans off their land, then shot dead one of their number fleeing Wounded Knee. We meet their descendants. Eddie Little Feather, drunk in the road, will be decapitated by a tractor trailer. The last of the Valens, Shane, is a creepy poacher who sleeps among animals. Meyers’ prose is strikingly physical, sometimes thrillingly so: driving on the highway, Angela Morrison realizes there’s a rattlesnake nestling at her feet. But occasionally he wanders into gothic territory; there are entirely too many rattlers attending the gruesome deaths of Shane and his mother. Throughout, the bell tolls for Hayley Jo. What if friends had intervened over her anorexia? The questions linger as we delve into other lives. Sometimes connections seem forced, yet Meyers brings everything into alignment for his epilogue, in which a group of Native Americans conduct an offbeat, good-humored exorcism involving the killer’s Continental.
Terrific opening, terrific close, but a bumpy ride in between.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-15-101389-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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