Readers who stick around for the reveal will be rewarded with a tale about two women’s secrets that’s both entertaining and...
Old friends reminisce about their emotional high school years in this debut novel about acceptance.
Margaret MacGregor Monahan is happily married in Northern California, with kids, a husband, and her best friend, AnneMarie Calzaretta, nearby. What she can’t tell Anne is that her family may have to move to Minnesota, a secret Margaret keeps even as she prepares to host her friend’s wedding in her backyard. The two pals go way back, their adolescence documented in Margaret’s many diaries. When Anne asks to read the diaries, Margaret brings them out and recalls the beginning of high school. Summer camp brought summer romance, and her best confidante was Jennifer Cone, a sweet Mormon girl. In Margaret’s memories, high school is filled with mean girls, pep rallies, and flirtatious boys. But when teenage Anne comes to her with a secret, young Margaret struggles to respond as a friend, and as a religious person. In the present, the two women realize they’re each holding something back: Margaret confesses that she’s moving, and Anne reveals that she hasn’t been honest at work. As the two friends continue to prepare for Anne’s wedding, Margaret’s remembrances reveal that her friendship with Jennifer is indicative of something worrisome. The truth will bring Margaret and Anne closer, as teenagers and as the women they’ve grown up to be. It takes a while for this tale to warm up to its main characters, but once young Anne tells Margaret her secret, the stakes are raised and a compelling and uplifting story is revealed. The narration alternates between the drama of their high school years, and the bond of their friendship as adults, although the school portions sometimes drag (the Homecoming festivities take up nearly four chapters). Pop-culture references are frequent enough that the book could come with its own soundtrack of Van Halen tunes and modern Flo Rida songs. What could plateau as a predictable coming-of-age story takes an interesting turn when the truth about Jennifer is revealed, elevating First’s novel from a bunch of sentimental recollections to an absorbing read.
Readers who stick around for the reveal will be rewarded with a tale about two women’s secrets that’s both entertaining and surprisingly touching.Pub Date: June 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-940716-97-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Spark Press
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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