Adept at creating romantic fiction for women who want to think they are above romantic fiction, de los Santos offers...
In the latest from de los Santos (Belong to Me, 2008, etc.), a single mother’s effort to reunite with her two best friends from college after a six-year silence doesn’t pan out exactly as she expected.
After Pen met Cat (their cute, sexually ambiguous names a telling coincidence) and Will at the start of their freshman year at an unnamed Southern college, the three quickly recognized they were soul mates and became inseparable. Other friends and even lovers had to play second fiddle to their platonic threesome. After college, the three lived together until petite, half-Filipino Cat, who suffered from occasional epileptic seizures and was the most vivacious and quirky member of the group, decided she wanted to get married and moved out. The friendship was so intense that it could not survive alteration, and soon Will moved out too. In the ensuing six years, Pen has heard nothing from her friends. She is living with her brother while raising her 5-year-old daughter Augusta, the result of an affair with a likable jerk who has returned to his former wife, when she receives an e-mail from Cat begging her to meet at their college reunion. Will, now an author of children’s books, receives the same e-mail and shows up too. But instead of Cat, Cat’s husband Jason appears. He sent the e-mails and now begs them to help him find Cat, who disappeared shortly after her father’s death (Pen is still mourning the death of her own father two years earlier while Will’s father is alive but out of his life). Soon the three, plus Augusta, head to the Philippines. Pen and Will grapple with their confused, perhaps not so platonic feelings for each other as well as their ambivalence toward crude but oddly sympathetic Jason, a dead ringer for the actor Jason Segel.
Adept at creating romantic fiction for women who want to think they are above romantic fiction, de los Santos offers ever-so-sensitive protagonists who are surprisingly dense about their actual feelings.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-167087-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
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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