First novel by an Irish-American former nun that’s more a spirited reprise of the Roman Catholic Church’s response to the spiritual and temporal changes of the 1960s than an engrossing tale of a young nun’s growing disillusionment with convent life. Margaret Mary Lynch, who narrates her own story, wants to make her life count’so, in 1962, after graduating from high school, she enters the convent of the Sisters of Redemption. These are the same Sisters who run the school she’d attended in the Chicago suburb where she lived with her large Irish-American family. Two uncles are priests; the others all dabble in politics of one kind or another—and, given the time and the place, it’s no surprise that the politics are Democratic and the loyalties fierce, especially to John F. Kennedy. Margaret Mary, soon to be called Sister Maura, vividly details convent life, as well as the various stages an aspiring nun must attain before making her final vows. Spirited and unconventional, she finds it difficult to observe some of the rules—for example, being allowed to write only one letter a month to her family. As she moves up the religious ladder while attending college, she reacts to the great changes of the era: Pope John’s new dispensations, the Kennedy assassination, the civil rights marches. By the time she has earned her degree and been sent on a mission to a Chicago inner-city school run by the order, Margaret still feels that being a nun offers the best chance to make a difference. But the senior nuns’ reactions to the Chicago riots after Martin Luther King’s death change her attitude. Offended by their racial prejudice and sent to teach in a white suburb, instead of where she might really help, Margaret leaves the order—as soon do many other sisters, she learns years later. However worthy its intentions, the author’s narrative makes Margaret seem more self-absorbed Boomer than believer agonizing over her vocation. The result seems too light a take on a heavy subject.
Pub Date: Oct. 22, 1998
ISBN: 1-874597-71-5
Page Count: 380
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
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
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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