Sudsy adolescent melodrama is compensated for by a complex portrayal of small-town life, and by the care second-novelist...
An Iowa teenager grows through a year of grieving after her mother’s suicide—in a gentle story hovering on the brink of sentimentality.
One night in the spring of 1975, Alice’s mother Annie parks her car on a train track and waits for the train to hit. Three days later, 15-year-old Alice begins to hear her dead mother’s voice. Annie, in fact, fills Alice in on so many otherwise unknowable details about her past that after awhile the voice begins to feel less like a spiritual connection and more like simply a contrivance for getting information across. We learn that Annie left Iowa at 17, heading to New York with a man she met on a train after the man she really loved died. Four years later, she came home with one baby in her arms and pregnant with another. Being the kind of troubled-but-charismatic single mother now almost a cliché of contemporary women’s fiction, she was adored by her kids but never did fit back into small-town life. Now, though, Alice, her 16-year-old brother Will, and their guardian—Annie’s older sister Aggie—must cope with Annie’s death. Aggie turns to art and faces her life-long loneliness. Will, a star athlete too kind and brotherly to pass belief, breaks up with his genuinely nice girlfriend and starts hanging out with sensitive bad boy Joe Fry. It’s not long before Alice and Joe make eye contact and Alice soon loses her virginity. Then Alice discovers that class slut Paula—a nicer girl than her looseness would suggest—is pregnant. Heartbroken, Alice assumes Joe is the father, but readers will have already guessed the truth.
Sudsy adolescent melodrama is compensated for by a complex portrayal of small-town life, and by the care second-novelist Pietrzyk (Pears on a Willow Tree, 1998 ) takes in developing the little moments that make up Alice’s life.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-055465-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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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