Some fine descriptive passages and a refreshingly nuanced portrait of African-Americans who are not obsessed by race, but...
First-novelist Clair expands on several stories from Rattlebone (1994) to chronicle a decade in the life of a midwestern schoolteacher.
In the fall of 1950, 23-year-old October Brown is about to begin her second year at the Stowe School and pleased to be living in the most respectable boardinghouse for African-Americans in Wyandotte County, Kansas. Respectability is important to October, whose father Franklin murdered wife Carrie in 1931 while their two young daughters were doing the dishes downstairs. Aunts Frances and Maude lovingly raised the girls in Chillicothie, Ohio, but their refusal to discuss that dreadful night or its aftermath has left a lot of emotional loose ends. October falls in love with the father of one of her students and becomes pregnant; when he returns to his wife, she goes home to Chillicothie to have her baby. Older sister Vergie, long married but unable to bear a child, is only too happy to take David when the shell-shocked new mother shows no interest. October gets a teaching job in Kansas City, Missouri, where no one knows her scandalous past, but soon regrets giving up her baby. Over the years, tensions mount as October tries to find some place for herself in David’s life while Vergie fiercely resists every effort as a move toward snatching back “her” son. Awkward, pseudo-mythic interpolations by the girls’ dead mother add nothing to the textured but self-conscious narrative, which calls too much attention to details like October’s love of sewing and fashion. Hyped-up prose (“They wept . . . for their own pitiful, wonderful selves, their stupidity and their courage”) doesn’t make the sisters’ final reconciliation as moving as the author clearly intends, and tentative closure with the father they thought was dead is achieved through an outrageous coincidence only Dickens could have pulled off.
Some fine descriptive passages and a refreshingly nuanced portrait of African-Americans who are not obsessed by race, but the tale’s overly studied quality suggests that this material has been worked over one too many times.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50630-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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