In these tasty noir stylings, you can almost smell the smoke and hear the clinking of ice cubes.
A schoolteacher gets jumpy when her brother falls for sizzling hot dame.
Well, it’s not quite as sleazy as that, but this first novel has everything one could hope for in a noir without ever seeming imitative or stale. The author of The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir (not reviewed), Abbott knows just how to set her readers up for her taut little tale set, natch, in the City of Angels in the 1950s. Narrator Lora King is a quiet girl with no real romantic prospects. Not old but definitely not young, she’s a teacher who spends most of her time with her square-jawed and well-meaning brother Bill, an investigator for the DA’s office. When Bill gets married to Alice Steele, a drop-dead-gorgeous glamour girl who reeks of femme fatale, you’d think it would pull brother and sister apart. But even Lora has to admit that Alice, for all her mysterious past and near-neurotic levels of antic activity, seems like a pretty good wife, all said, with fancy dinner parties, cocktail hours with the neighbors, nightclub outings. Like the sister Lora never had, Alice even comes to teach at Lora’s school and gets her a boyfriend, a publicist she knows from back when she worked in movies. But, still, Lora can see the chinks in Alice’s façade. She knows that Alice’s friends look like trouble. And there are those rumors she’s starting to hear. . . . Not for Abbot are the self-conscious pastiches of Chandler imitators or the crazed spewings of a James Ellroy, but instead she gives us the true dark heart of the city in sharply contrasted blacks and whites, dense with heartache. Even though readers may be reminded of a dozen previous books or films, Abbott makes sure they won’t mistake this one for any but her own.
In these tasty noir stylings, you can almost smell the smoke and hear the clinking of ice cubes.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-6170-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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