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OUR NAPOLEON IN RAGS

Name: OUR NAPOLEON IN RAGS
Author: Kirby Gann
ISBN: 0-9752517-3-2

by Kirby Gann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2005

Impressive and ambitious work from a talent to watch closely.

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Second-novelist Gann (The Barbarian Parade, 2002) delves into the lives of eccentric and semi-lost regulars at a bar in a forsaken part of town.

The city is Montreux (along the Ohio River, possibly), the once-thriving neighborhood is Old Towne, and the bar, windmill adorning it and alley out behind, is the Don Quixote. And things indeed have fallen far. We meet, for example, Haycraft Keebler, whose father was once the mayor, sufficiently successful, known and honored that his statue still stands in the city park. Haycraft, too, is a political idealist and worker, though his poverty, many oddities and his bipolar medical condition reduce him to the comedic Napoleon-in-rags of the title. Aging ex-hippies Beau and Glenda Stiles own and operate the establishment (its end will come at the close), looking after their flock (the tips jar is for Hay’s rent) and sometimes being looked after in return (Haycraft shares his psycho meds with Glenda). The merit of Gann’s story lies less in what’s told than it does in the telling—a telling that, albeit sometimes slow, is rich, evocative and textured. As the characters’ lives move toward their ends, so moves a whole era toward its end. Haycraft will fall in love with a young street hustler named Lambret Dellinger—with heartbreak the result. Romeo Díaz will lose his lover, ex-ballet dancer Amanda, as she goes off to huge fame as a porn star. And Mather, the retarded boy whom Beau and Glenda have harbored for years, giving him a place to live in exchange for his cleaning up around the place, will die in a scene (though not Gann’s best) of miscommunication and dumb violence. Readers may now and again need a certain patience to get there, but Haycraft’s fate at story’s end—and the conclusion generally—will reward them with closing fictional moments of the wonderful and significant.

Impressive and ambitious work from a talent to watch closely.

Pub Date: April 1, 2005

ISBN: 0-9752517-3-2

Page Count: 216

Publisher: Ig Publishing

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE ALCHEMIST

by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

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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.