A charming, readable tale about a resilient woman’s search for her family—both regular and supernatural.
A Midwesterner recalls her semienchanted childhood.
This latest novel from Koerber (I Once Was Lost but Now I’m Found, 2017) tells the complicated family history of a 65-year-old woman named Andy. She lives in sleepy Allenburg, Iowa, “a small market town in the Midwest, surrounded by puppy mills, factory farms, and meth labs. And cornfields. Lots of gravel roads and lots of cornfields.” Andy looks back on her life growing up in this quiet, peaceful backwater, living with her brother, Danny, and her caustic, bitter mother, Cindy (her father, scorned by Cindy, left long ago). Andy and her mother enjoy chain-smoking and trading barbs. When she’s 13, Andy meets her “fairy godmother,” Alana, and, intriguingly, the label in the girl’s reminiscences seems as much literal as figurative. Alana introduces Andy to the world of Algonquin folklore, which she eagerly absorbs: “She wanted to understand the words of the oldest jiibay, or fairies, from back before they learned Native words and long before they started speaking English.” Andy’s memories move forward in time to encompass her mother’s failing health and her own relationship with her daughter, Bridget. Koerber balances her narrative’s relaxed and direct pacing with frequent, evocative descriptions of the seasonal beauty of the Midwest, which Andy always remembers warmly: “The grass in the yard was silvery, the trees a strange dense black flecked with the starlight that reflected off the leaves. She felt the night air wrap itself around her, heavy as a wool blanket.” The tale progresses naturally through Andy’s memories as she recalls encountering more clues as to the nature and whereabouts of her missing father. The author smoothly works in light fantasy elements, touching on the fairy kingdom that’s always adjacent to the real world. “Aunty” Alana tells Andy stories about that jiibay realm and its ways. The resulting gentle mix of small-town life and glamorous fairies is ultimately enchanting.
A charming, readable tale about a resilient woman’s search for her family—both regular and supernatural.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-946044-40-2
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Who Chains You Books
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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