Mullett Lake in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula provides the backdrop for this shifting narrative of love, death and a second chance.
Coburn’s romantic novel is shared by a quartet of characters: Paul Crockett is a reliable local handyman/contractor; Jessica is the love of his life; Claudia Cardinelli is a vacation cottager with a wandering husband, Freddie; and supporting this cast is neighbor Agnes Decker, who is a catalyst for helping Paul and Claudia move beyond their low points. Claudia has had a miscarriage and later discovers Freddie is having an affair. Faced with these revelations, she considers divorce, but fate steps in and Freddie is killed in a motorcycle accident (along with his girlfriend). Before his demise, readers observe Freddie in a bar with his girlfriend, and his Harley Davidson parked outside, though these glimpses elicit little empathy from the reader. As Paul tools around Mullett Lake, readers learn the back story of his relationship with Jessica; the two were very much in love and moved away from the community, but Paul has inexplicably returned alone. Paul, 50, and 35-year-old Claudia are brought together by Mrs. Decker and some time after going to the Hack-Ma-Tack for drinks, they fall in love. But is this the happily ever after for which they’re both looking for? And what about Jessica? Coburn effectively depicts this transitional time for Paul and Claudia. The novel is short and the pace is brisk. Characters are believable and the romance is engaging. Much is made of the age difference between Paul and Claudia, with a definite slant toward the 50-year-old male perspective. (Readers are reminded often that Paul is very fit.) While the story focuses on moving beyond loss and the importance of hope, the work would have benefited from more complexity. Strong in establishing the Mullett Lake environment, the author also nicely captures the bittersweet, fleeting quality of love. A pleasant, predictable tale that will satisfy fans of character-driven romance.
Pub Date: March 24, 2011
ISBN: 978-0615462127
Page Count: 118
Publisher: Michael Coburn Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2012
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
BOOK REVIEW
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