A tale of a woman’s childhood and adulthood employs both sweet clichés and genuine reflections on the passage of time.
A woman navigates change and growth while reckoning with memories of her youth in this debut novel.
Jill at first seems to have an idyllic childhood. Her adoring, artistic mother, Rebecca, is raising her in the Garden, a sprawling homestead full of creative horticultural designs. But Jill has just turned 10 and increasingly asks questions about the frequent absence of her father, Jay, a renowned photographer often away on assignment for months at a time. The Garden remains a paradise, but Jill’s struggle to decode her complicated family riddles is further challenged when her mother gives birth to a baby and tragedy strikes shortly after. Jill’s best friend, Susie, supports her throughout but must struggle with her own mother’s alcoholism. In interspersed chapters told parallel to this childhood tale, a grown Jill is trying to get her garden-ware business off the ground when a chance encounter with the handsome and spontaneous Charlie changes her life forever. The two feel an instant, deep connection, but their romance is complicated by personality differences and Jill’s memories of her past. As Jill grows older, some happy “endings” occur—a marriage, a successful business—but time continues to bring new challenges and realizations. Some elements of Jill’s life are so sentimental and picturesque that they border on the unrealistic or clichéd, yet Leet’s best passages utilize this almost saccharine quality by contrasting it with real change and pain. The book’s many episodes feel sometimes leisurely or overly wandering and random, and its characters likewise can read both as two-dimensional types sharing platitudes and as real individuals meditating on the nature of happiness. Charlie and Jill’s early courtship, for example, feels like a sketch of a romance lacking real characterization (Jill ultimately loses her virginity to Charlie, but the reason she stops waiting is never fully explained). Yet the give-and-take of their adult marriage resonates far more effectively, mirroring the well-written, alternatingly cheery and sad dynamics among Jill, Rebecca, and Jay.
A tale of a woman’s childhood and adulthood employs both sweet clichés and genuine reflections on the passage of time.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-943826-33-9
Page Count: 425
Publisher: Antrim House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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