A cleareyed but warm family saga of buried recriminations and the struggle for reconciliation.
A mother and her daughters reunite to dredge up old traumas in this tension-wracked drama.
Frances Rafferty has her normally cantankerous 84-year-old spirits lifted when her favorite daughter, Kathy, an off-Broadway actress with a rich second husband, decides to come home from New York to visit the family home in Brown County, Indiana. Also attending are Frances’ daughter Edie, a doormat housewife, and her dyspeptic husband, Sam, who actually inhabit the family home, having exiled Frances to a mother-in-law trailer in the backyard; and third daughter Rosie, a psychologist who is bitterly estranged from Frances and is bringing her disabled son in tow. The narrative unfolds over a three-day weekend of dinners, Scrabble games, church, and squabbles, told through ruminative soliloquies by each of the women probing her present feelings and past resentments from times when the family almost disintegrated in madness and poverty. Each woman’s soul and secrets are laid bare: Kathy, a domineering diva who puts up a front of ebullient cheer while denying the reality that her life’s stability is about to collapse; Edie, perpetually striving to please everyone around her and guilt-stricken when she can’t, who harbors a hidden passion for an old flame; Rosie, seething with bitterness toward Frances over a childhood wound her sisters know nothing about. Thomas (Blessed Transgression, 2015, etc.) creates vibrant, sharply etched characters who come with plenty of rancorous baggage but manage to unpack enough of it to regain sympathy for one another and themselves. They come alive through the author’s gift for crafting distinctive voices in well-observed dialogue, emerging through their own reflections and the refracted perspectives of their loved ones. Thomas writes in a relaxed, understated prose that conveys the heavy emotional impact of family conflicts without histrionics and melodrama. (Frances in a rare moment of contentment: “I woke up all of a sudden. And the sweetest feelin’ come over me. Like an angel of the Lord done passed through the room. And I couldn’t help but call out in the darkness, ‘God is good.’ Yup, that’s all I could think to say. God is good.”) Readers should root for Frances and her daughters as they fitfully knit their family ties back together.
A cleareyed but warm family saga of buried recriminations and the struggle for reconciliation.Pub Date: July 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9976445-0-0
Page Count: 252
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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