The process of procurement is duly horrific, but the procurer’s transformation from ruthless to compassionate, even with the...
An eerie debut novel from Faber, Dutch-born, turns the Scottish Highlands into a landscape from The Twilight Zone as Scotland’s brawny best meet their match in the diminutive Isserly, who takes many of them on a short ride from which there’s no return.
Isserly is like a woman possessed as day after day she cruises back and forth on the Highland highways on the lookout for male hitchhikers with big thighs and broad chests. Once she finds one, she gives him a lift and immediately puts him at ease by placing her own ample chest on display. The whole of her is strange—dwarflike, heavily scarred, Coke-bottle glasses—but the huge breasts are what hold the eye of her passenger, keeping him transfixed while she engages him in conversation. If the talk goes in one direction, Isserly lets her man go, but if she gets the answers she seeks, her breath grows shallow, her heart races, and she flips the switch that will drug the man through his seat, incapacitating him long enough for her to drive him back to her remote farmhouse, where he will undergo an experience outdoing his worst nightmare. Isserly, it turns out, is a procurer from another planet whose job—for which she’s been surgically altered in a way that leaves her in constant pain—is simply, well, to bring home the bacon. But she has fallen in love with this world of sea and snow so unlike her own, and when a handsome visitor from her world arrives to remind her that in spite of her mutilation her feelings are not dead, she realizes she’s no longer able to do her job.
The process of procurement is duly horrific, but the procurer’s transformation from ruthless to compassionate, even with the conventional budding-romance twist, provides a more compelling dimension—and it’s enhanced by the superbly evoked imagery of the Highlands.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-15-100626-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
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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