The intelligent, compassionate, and talented McColley does his best to arouse sympathy for his beset young protagonist, but...
A horrific tale by the author of Praying to a Laughing God (1998) about guerrilla fighting during the Civil War, featuring monsters on both sides.
Blame that on the violent, bloody, and brutalizing conflict—McColley does. He gives us Jacob Wilson, a 17-year-old Ohio farm boy much like any other kid his age at the outset, who is changed drastically by terrible events. It's 1860, the war merely months away. The Wilsons have been hiding a pair of runaway slaves, one of them a pretty young girl with whom Jacob has fallen in love. Led by an arrogant lout of a sergeant, a search party of local militia suddenly descends on the family. A neighbor, a close friend of the Wilsons, helps the slaves escape and is hanged by Sergeant McGown for his trouble. Jacob goes berserk, takes an ax to McGown and another soldier who gets in the way, then flees. After some half-crazed wandering, he winds up in Missouri as a rider in Confederate partisan William Quantrill's infamous band of mounted murderers. (Ideology has nothing to do with which side people end up on in this deeply cynical tale.) Haunted by what he construes as McGown's inescapable ghost, Jacob transforms himself into a remorselessly efficient killing machine. No Union sympathizer, no matter how young or casually identified, is safe. Jacob and his mostly teenaged cohorts slaughter zestfully, insisting quite accurately that Yankee guerrillas are doing the same. Ugly act follows despicable deed, and by the time Quantrill's marauders confront their grim destiny, only shreds of humanity still cling to Jacob.
The intelligent, compassionate, and talented McColley does his best to arouse sympathy for his beset young protagonist, but the later chapters are such a catalogue of horrors that readers are unlikely to be persuaded.Pub Date: June 13, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-85762-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of...
Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest (Magic Hour, 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State.
Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Meanwhile a love triangle blooms at KCPO: Hard-bitten, irresistibly handsome, former war correspondent Johnny is clearly smitten with Tully. Expecting rejection, Kate keeps her infatuation with Johnny secret. When Tully lands a reporting job with a Today-like show, her career shifts into hyperdrive. Johnny and Kate had started an affair once Tully moved to Manhattan, and when Kate gets pregnant with daughter Marah, they marry. Kate is content as a stay-at-home mom, but frets about being Johnny’s second choice and about her unrealized writing ambitions. Tully becomes Seattle’s answer to Oprah. She hires Johnny, which spells riches for him and Kate. But Kate’s buttons are fully depressed by pitched battles over slutwear and curfews with teenaged Marah, who idolizes her godmother Tully. In an improbable twist, Tully invites Kate and Marah to resolve their differences on her show, only to blindside Kate by accusing her, on live TV, of overprotecting Marah. The BFFs are sundered. Tully’s latest attempt to salvage Cloud fails: The incorrigible, now geriatric hippie absconds once more. Just as Kate develops a spine, she’s given some devastating news. Will the friends reconcile before it’s too late?
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of poignancy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36408-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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