An often unsettling but ultimately profound meditation on the depth of psychological suffering after a sexual assault and...
A woman wrestles with the haunting specter of her rape in this sequel.
Lannis Parker, a successful pilot, was brutally raped by Robert Davis, a sadistic repeat offender. The sting of the trauma drives her to seek refuge in the oblivion of alcohol and to conceal the attack from even her closest friends and family out of shame. With the encouragement of her fiance, Ben Martin, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent, she presses charges against Davis and has him arrested. Davis decides to defend himself in court and uses the process to intimidate Lannis; the account the author provides of Davis’ cross-examination of Lannis is chillingly cringe-inducing. Despite Lannis’ significant personal progress—she joins Alcoholics Anonymous and quits drinking and works hard to open up about her suppressed feelings of helplessness and self-contempt—she still struggles to move past the emotional fallout of the assault. She surprisingly decides that the only route to peace is to be found through the humanization of her attacker—she needs to learn to understand, forgive, and even love the monster who gleefully robbed her of her serenity: “There’s nothing new to talk about. I’m doing everything I’m supposed to. Journaling, the little exercises she gave me, taking care of myself. But I sense what needs doing now is more spiritual, like God is asking me to go somewhere else with the experience.” This is the second installment in the Appalachian Foothill series but is intended to be a stand-alone volume, readable independent of its predecessor. Lynch (Christmas Grace, 2015) deftly unpacks the heavy emotional freight rape victims shoulder, although in some scenes she makes her point too heavy-handedly. For example, Lannis’ mother reacts incredulously to her daughter’s disclosure that she was raped, a reflex that strikes a false note. In addition, the story swarms with subplots, which prove distracting. The author’s depiction of Davis’ psychological disfigurement is as unflinching as it is disturbing, though the more monstrously he is drawn, the less plausible Lannis’ attempts to love him seem. The book’s central virtue is the subtle parsing of the deepest wound rape inflicts—the insidious transformation of the victim into an accomplice in her own violation and the bottomless ignominy that generates. Lynch’s second novel is worth reading for that alone.
An often unsettling but ultimately profound meditation on the depth of psychological suffering after a sexual assault and the potential for healing.Pub Date: June 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-941728-01-7
Page Count: 318
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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