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TO LOVE IS TO LIVE

Name: TO LOVE IS TO LIVE
Author: Mashael Makhadmi
ISBN: 978-1450238656

by Mashael Makhadmi ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 22, 2010

An intense, tragic, but ultimately hopeful accounting of the price—and value—of passion.

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Obsessive love inspires a torrent of conflicted emotions in these heartfelt poems.

Love, Makhadmi writes in “I Love Love,” detonates “like the alpha phase of an atomic bomb,” and the 99 poems she gathers here register the searing heat, abject surrender and toxic fallout that ensue. The latter two predominate in her first section, “Poems of Painful Love,” addressed by a besotted woman—in “Raindrops” she wonders, “How can my life have meaning / When the sole purpose of my existence is to love you?”—to a nameless, and often heartless, man. “My stomach fills with pain you’ve left me in,” she keens to her cruelly absent lover in “Drown” before continuing: “I drown in tears that have fallen from my lashes; / Like a seal, I can’t keep up with killer whales.” In “Day and Night,” her unhinged anguish turns to self-victimization: “I cut my flesh to give relief to the constant agony in my heart.” In “Pain,” the tears and blood dry up under a hot anger: “To taste your pain excites me; / To hurt you is my mission. / Oh, how senseless I can be, / And send you to a mortician.” Makhadmi’s dark, repetitive, incantatory images of blood, tears and rainfall lift in the concluding section, “Poems of Sweet Love.” Here the woman’s devotion remains self-immolating—“I would sacrifice my happiness for you alone; / Like a wounded fox, I would lie on train tracks,” she vows in “Sacrifice”—but in “No Boundaries” it yields a quiet joy—“Like the beauty of a flamingo, / My love for you is never ending”—and in “To Know You”—“My heart pitter patters with excitement…Because to know you is to love you”—a sunny lyricism. Makhadmi’s unwavering focus on her narrator’s inner feelings often turns the figure of the lover into a cipher, yet it works: her poetry vividly conveys a certain rapturous kind of love that blocks out everything but the heart’s desire.

An intense, tragic, but ultimately hopeful accounting of the price—and value—of passion.

Pub Date: July 22, 2010

ISBN: 978-1450238656

Page Count: 148

Publisher: iUniverse

Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2010

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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MAGIC HOUR

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

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Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.

Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

Pub Date: March 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-345-46752-3

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah

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by Kristin Hannah

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THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

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A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.