Insightful about self-harm, addiction, and patterns that bind.
A woman struggling with addiction and self-cutting confronts her past choices and comes to new understandings in Kasimatis’ debut novel.
It’s 1963, and 10-year-old Mary Therese Panos—called Mae—is being sent to St. Mary’s boarding school, an hour from her Chicago home. Her Uncle Nick is paying for it to help out Mae’s mother, a struggling widow. As the novel goes forward and backward in time, Mae’s experience of being forced into a situation not of her choosing becomes a pattern in her life. By 1970, Mae, now 17, is a senior at St. Mary’s and defiant, sneaking joints and falling in love with Jack. She wants to marry soon, but Uncle Nick says no, and Jack suggests waiting two years. Enraged, Mae breaks off the engagement. In early 1971, Mae has become reckless enough to get wasted at a party and have sex that she doesn’t remember with a boy she’s just met, Joe “Tommy” Thomasini. When she gets pregnant, she’s urged to have the baby adopted, but Tommy puts aside his Notre Dame scholarship to study engineering for a quick wedding and a hardware-store job. By 1979, Mae keeps a tidy house and loves her daughter, Kristy, though she resents Tommy’s long hours and resists his enthusiasm about moving to a better neighborhood. When he surprises her by buying a new house, Mae again feels outmaneuvered and falls into a cycle of substance abuse, depression, and self-harm. But a moment of grace in her downward spiral could be the key to accepting the help she needs. In her novel, Kasimatis brings an observant eye to the threads in Mae’s personality and history that contribute to her challenges. Although the first chapter is somewhat overwritten, the book generally portrays Mae’s anguished point of view delicately while also showing its limitations, such as self-pity and a lack of appreciation for how others have also faced reduced choices. The novel builds nicely toward Christmas and Mae’s humiliating public meltdown, followed by an illuminating aftermath—occurring, as the chapter title slyly points out, just before Epiphany.
Insightful about self-harm, addiction, and patterns that bind.Pub Date: April 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5481-6759-2
Page Count: 252
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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