Witty, fast-paced fun: a great story (already winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize) that keeps the tempo up and doesn’t take...
A kind of darkly comic Asian version of Midnight Express, as second-novelist Kneale (the Whitbread-winning English Passengers, 2000) describes a young Englishman trapped in Japan.
Daniel Thayne is your typical middle-class dropout. Shortly after leaving university, Dan decides to chuck England altogether, and eventually ends up in Japan. There, he finds work teaching English at the Vital School, a storefront operation patronized mainly by bored housewives and unmarried girls looking for foreign husbands. The wages are lousy, the students difficult, and Daniel is never paid on time. Why does he stay? Well, he’s lost his passport, for one thing. And he’s started going out with one of his students, for another. His girlfriend Keiko is pouty and immature, fond of Mickey Mouse and stuffed animals, but she’s cute and devoted to Daniel in a shy kind of way. Daniel, for his part, is far from being in love with Keiko, but he has few friends in Tokyo and depends upon her company. When she tells him she’s pregnant, he is shocked but agrees to do the right thing and marry her. Still, he begins to express reluctance when Keiko’s father sets up a wedding on a week’s notice. He becomes even more suspicious when Keiko’s family keeps him virtually locked up in their house in anticipation of the happy day. And he begins to panic outright when it becomes obvious that the family business involves shabby hotels in the bad part of town. It’s one thing to break an engagement—and another to walk out on a mobster’s daughter. Especially when you have no passport, your own parents don’t know where you are, and you don’t have a yen to your name.
Witty, fast-paced fun: a great story (already winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize) that keeps the tempo up and doesn’t take itself too seriously. Kneale is out of the gate running.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-297-82899-1
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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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