A message-driven narrative that encourages women to follow their own paths.
A 19th-century patriarchy cannot stop an independent woman and her granddaughter from determining their futures in this debut novel.
Emma Wool, born in 1812—the fifth child and only daughter of a prosperous wool merchant in the village of Greenland—is raised in a severely misogynistic society. Her only future rests in acquiring a suitable husband, for whom she must produce sons. Her father clarifies the gender demarcation when she is age 6 and wants to go outside with her brothers: “You are a girl; you can’t play with boys anymore.” And so Emma is eventually married off to Arthur Waves, a “great warrior,” who becomes a devoted husband—until her first pregnancy results in the birth of twin girls, Alice and Rose. Arthur becomes indifferent and cruel, and the townsfolk turn against her. When she next gives birth to twin sons, Albert and Fred, her social position, if not her warm feelings toward Arthur, is re-established. Arthur is killed in battle, and Emma, the respected widow of a hero, inherits his house and land. This is when she begins to shine. Determined to control her own destiny, she refuses to consider another marriage and devotes her life to raising her four small children and to building the most successful farm in Greenland. Enduring a lifetime of plot twists and tragedies, Emma presses on, ultimately finding joy in the knowledge that her youngest granddaughter, Mary, has the same strength and independence that has propelled her. The sometimes-overwrought novel reads much like an extended fable, with an implicit, scathing indictment of the mistreatment of women. Kallas’ text is linguistically simple, with few descriptions. Greenland does not exist in any specific country (it is just the name of a farming village), creating a sense of dislocation in the reader. Surnames are generic—Wool, Waves, Great—and characters, with the exception of Mary, are two-dimensional, serving more as archetypes. Emma is the backbone of the story, but readers often are not privy to her internal life. The deftly developed Mary is the one they get to know more intimately.
A message-driven narrative that encourages women to follow their own paths.Pub Date: March 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4908-2825-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2017
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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