A winning portrait of a high school teacher who struggles with her new career and memories of her own days as a student.
Back in the late 1970s, Nancy Adams had a fling with her high school teacher Russell Parsons. Twenty years later, widowed and adrift and living in her childhood home outside Jacksonville, Florida, she accepts Russell's offer to teach at her old high school. He's now the principal.
Nancy, a once-aspiring teacher who wrote book reviews during her time in Atlanta, is anything but a bookworm—we first encounter her sitting on a dock plugging Coke bottles with a gun. But she's unprepared for the foul mouths and minimal attention spans of her students. She doesn't know what to expect from Russell, whose beautiful wife never recovered mentally from a stroke she suffered after giving birth to twins. Nancy does know what to expect from the flirtatious Dell Rose, a handsome one-time basketball star who now coaches the school team, but she isn't sure what she wants from him, either. And then there's Dana, a mysterious, prematurely aged senior whose baby may be Russell's. Why else would he extend such preferential treatment to her? Nancy slowly makes her mark while becoming increasingly committed to her new calling. Much of her "education" as a teacher will be familiar to readers of high school fiction: She learns to deal with faculty members' egos, students' special needs and school board politics. But Nancy has such a lively, offbeat presence that you take an instant rooting interest in her. And Baker (The Flamingo Rising, 1997, etc.) depicts the other characters so well, and with such understanding, that the novel overcomes its somewhat dated quality.
A winning portrait of a high school teacher who struggles with her new career and memories of her own days as a student.Pub Date: June 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-888160-78-9
Page Count: 414
Publisher: Ice Tea Books/Ice Cube Press
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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