“It’s a heavy millstone,” the protagonist of this sad, salty novel reflects, “to be the son of a good father.” Daly Racklin, a genial, shrewd, hard-drinking lawyer and a minor celebrity in Pittsburgh’s Irish community, has just been told, as the story opens, that he has only a few months to live. This sudden onrush of mortality makes him reflect ruefully on the ways in which he has seemingly never measured up to his father, Boyce “Right” Racklin, a legendary battler for the rights of the underdog. Tales about Right Racklin still circulate freely about the bars and church halls of Oakland Park. In truth, though, the long-suffering Daly has labored hard to be his father’s son; even after he’s been told his heart will soon give out, he takes on the defense of a hapless young man found inconveniently near the body of a murder victim. He does what he can for the wonderfully delineated collection of eccentrics who have come to depend on him. And, in a last desperate effort to express some hope in life’s continuity, he even contemplates marrying his kind, quiet lover, Jessie. Much of the novel, which shuttles restlessly around the shrinking precincts of the Irish community, is taken up with tales of a livelier, more profane past, narrated in a diction both frank and lyrical, and leavened with an unblinking, dark-tinged humor. Like Goran’s two story collections set in Oakland Park (She Loved Me Once, 1997; Tales from the Irish Club, 1996), this exhibits a melancholy sense of endings. Daly, as he contemplates his own likely end, also reflects on his sense that the insulated, vibrant Irish milieu in which he was raised is gradually disappearing, its tales and memories along with it. Against the odds, Daly manages to win several modest, poignant victories—and even come to terms with his father’s complicated legacy. An appropriately bittersweet evocation of a largely vanished world, distinguished by its ripe, vigorous language and by a moving portrait of a troubled, decent man.
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-19540-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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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