A quirky, uplifting love story.
In Whitaker’s debut romance, a young doctor gets another chance at love when he discovers that his deceased childhood sweetheart has been reincarnated nearly two decades later.
Sixteen-year-old Amber Scott moves into a new house with her family in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies. Concerned about adjusting to life in a new town, Amber is delighted to notice a handsome boy about her age shooting baskets in the adjacent driveway. Before long, she and this next-door neighbor, Julian Cahill, become a devoted couple. It turns out that he’d been quite the lady’s man before meeting Amber, so everyone in town is surprised that someone has finally captured his heart. But as the couple grows closer, Amber begins having headaches and seizures, which turn out to be caused by a brain tumor; her health quickly deteriorates, and Julian is devastated. Amber is ultimately unable to beat the disease, and she dies the summer after her senior year in high school. During his mourning, Julian decides to become a neurosurgeon to honor her. The book then jumps forward 18 years, showing 35-year-old Julian as a renowned surgeon. He’s giving a tour of the hospital to young college students and is shocked to come face to face with Destiny Bradshaw, who’s the spitting image of his beloved. She soon reveals to him that she’s Amber, reincarnated. After initial skepticism, Julian is thrilled; however, Destiny is only 18, and she and Julian have many obstacles ahead of them. Although this story requires a significant suspension of disbelief, Whitaker manages to deliver a moving tale of love and heartbreak that’s as absorbing as it is touching. The prose is fast-paced, accessible, and engaging, and the dialogue usefully moves the jam-packed plot forward, although the teenage characters sometimes speak with a maturity that feels like a bit of a stretch. Still, the tale is full of humorous and sentimental moments that illuminate the struggle of finding and maintaining a meaningful relationship. There are so many clever plot details and intriguing subplots, though, that the story might have fared better if it were told in multiple volumes or even as a series.
A quirky, uplifting love story.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5496-4080-3
Page Count: 485
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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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