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BODIES IN MOTION

Name: BODIES IN MOTION
Author: Mary Anne Mohanraj
ISBN: 0-06-078118-1

by Mary Anne Mohanraj ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 5, 2005

Intricately interwoven stories featuring sensual language and surprising sexual twists.

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Twenty stories span most of the 20th century and several Sri Lankan families, emphasizing the pangs of exile and the wrench of breaking with tradition.

Mohanraj’s first collection opens in 1939 with “Oceans Bright and Wide,” which explores a couple’s decision to let their brilliant daughter, Shanthi, take a path that will lead to her leaving the country then known as Ceylon to study at Oxford. Their eldest daughter came home to live after an arranged marriage to a man who beat her; the parents show their love for Shanthi by letting her go. She turns up 16 years later in “The Princess in the Forest,” married to a University of Chicago professor she knows is betraying her. Her feelings about his affair are interwoven with the tale of Prince Rama, the woman he loves, and the bitterness that comes when his brother arrives in the forest to spoil things. In “Seven Cups of Water,” too-short, too-plump Mangai tells of her brother’s wedding day in 1948 and the seven nights thereafter, during which she encounters his bride in the family kitchen in an increasingly erotic connection. “Pieces of the Heart” introduces Shanthi’s athletic and studious daughter, Leilani, “a nice Tamil girl” and a student at the University of Chicago, who’s lured in 1966 to the roof of the library and into the beginnings of a love affair with her roommate, Sue. Later tales reveal the repercussions of the civil war in Sri Lanka. In “Mangoes with Chili,” a Sinhalese woman has a child by the Tamil boy her father refused to let her marry. When the troubles begin and her parents are killed, Himali brings the baby to Ashok; he leaves his wife, and the lovers emigrate to San Francisco. Their son Roshan appears again in “Challah,” now as a young hospital intern who becomes the lover of a gay doctor, only to reveal later that he, Roshan, is a married man.

Intricately interwoven stories featuring sensual language and surprising sexual twists.

Pub Date: July 5, 2005

ISBN: 0-06-078118-1

Page Count: 288

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE ALCHEMIST

by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

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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.