This light but charming follow-up to Copper Crown (1991) is the whimsical story of a Southern California healer, her female clients, and their effect on her angelic daughter's first love affair. It took the love of a lifetime to transform Ann McCafferty, a Protestant counselor living in the California suburb of Marbury Park, into Anna de la Senda, a psychic healer whose house is filled with painted icons and chirping birds and whose circle of clients, the Lovelorn Women, drop in once a week for tea and sympathy. Anna's beloved husband, a house painter named Cristobal, converted her to Catholicism and also taught her to appreciate the mystical- -before bolting back to his first family in Mexico. Since then her life has focused on their ethereal daughter, Mariela, who is now 18 and in love herself for the first time. Anna is not pleased to learn that the object of Mariela's passion is Addison Ettinger, son of the rich, arrogant, recently widowed doctor next door; she foresees that the unequal liaison will bring sorrow to her daughter. When Dr. Ettinger asks Anna to counsel him in his grief, however, the healer soon finds herself falling in love with her patient, and it is all she can do to reject him when her prophecy comes true. Soon after Addison escapes to a writer's colony in New Mexico, Mariela learns she's pregnant. Anna suffers while her daughter grieves and eventually loses the baby. Life seems to be turning out tragically for all concerned until the Lovelorn Women come to the rescue—retrieving Addison from his hideaway, giggling and chattering among themselves while they wait for the de la Senda women and their lovers to reunite. An endearing tale, though von Herzen's characters are, for the most part, familiar members of the magical realism roster. (Literary Guild selection)
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-525-93890-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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