An overwritten first novel with a high emotional pitch tells of two very different women whose lives briefly intersect, and are changed forever, when one, mourning her own losses, steals the other’s baby. Lynelle, despite her happy marriage to Hogan, is still hurting from the death of her mother, Grace, when she was a child in Florida. Now living in New Jersey, she names her newborn Grace, but the child dies from sudden infant death syndrome. Unable to deal with this new grief on top of her old sorrows, Lynelle goes to Florida for healing comfort. Meanwhile, in Illinois, Annie, wife of successful executive David and mother of Nick, Sophie, and baby Dylan, works as a volunteer at a battered women’s center while studying for her master’s. Yet she feels frazzled and tired, and though she loves Dylan dearly, she hadn—t wanted a third child’she—d wanted instead to make a life for herself. She hopes her upcoming visit to Florida to see her ailing father will restore her. Told in alternating chapters, the two women’s tales are filled with would-be profundities: “[H]e understood me in a funny roundabout kind of way. The only way anyone can understand another person, by looking sideways, around the face we put on for the world.” In Florida, Lynelle impulsively makes off with Dylan, whom Nick has momentarily left alone, and heads to her old home, only to find all the familiar landmarks gone. When Dylan is discovered missing, Annie is distraught, Nick feels guilty, and David, usually in control, can’t handle the crisis. The baby is soon found, and Lynelle is arrested, but Annie, relieved that Dylan is safe, wants to meet his kidnapper. A meeting ensues, with unexpected consequences for both of them. Now they can move on, having learned that being loved and forgiven matters, that life is filled with “love and pain, with loss and discovery.” Pulp fiction.
Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2000
ISBN: 0-525-94536-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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