With shades of Rebecca and The Secret History, Atkins has produced an eerie page-turner that will have readers guessing from...
An academic partnership turns sour in this tense and moody thriller.
Professor Olivia Sweetman has it all: a happy family life with her husband and three children and a career on the rise as both an academic and popular historian frequently appearing on television. When she hears about a Victorian diary—containing a scandalous confession—written by one of the first women doctors, she knows she’s found the topic for her first book. The diary, however, comes with a catch—a relationship with Vivian Tester, the woman who discovered it. Vivian is brilliant but mysterious and has a very different way of seeing the world than Olivia. She's an extremely competent researcher, and she and Olivia enter into a working relationship. As their work progresses, though, their relationship becomes increasingly fraught; both women keep secrets from the other, revealed to the reader in alternating chapters either narrated by Vivian in first person or from Olivia’s point of view in third. Author Atkins (The Other Child, 2016, etc.) peppers every page with hints of things unsaid and dark underlying secrets. Sometimes the foreshadowing is a little overdone and heavy-handed, but it does not take away from the incredible number of twists and turns that appear as the novel stalks toward its ending. There’s a ghost haunting the story, both literally and metaphorically, and that sense of unease keeps pushing all the way to the last, intense pages. A reckoning is coming, but why? The need to know what will happen when the inescapable comes to pass drives the reader ever forward even as a sense of dread pervades the narrative. Things must end, but they won’t end well.
With shades of Rebecca and The Secret History, Atkins has produced an eerie page-turner that will have readers guessing from the first.Pub Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78648-218-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Mobius
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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