Thoughtful, lovingly written tale of one woman’s quiet determination to survive, from playwright and second-novelist Rawles...
Come hell or high water, Camille Broussard cooks.
A housekeeper for many years at the Catholic rectory in her parish, the widowed Camille still dreams of opening a restaurant featuring the Creole stews and gumbos of her small Louisiana hometown. While she prepares spicy meat pies (a popular item at the funeral home), she reminisces about her peaceful childhood and later move to Los Angeles, where she married her second cousin Henri Broussard and raised seven children amidst the riots and strife of 1960s Watts. The close-knit community of transplanted southern blacks never recovered, but she still thinks of it as home—one she will never leave. Yet by now, according to her unofficial reckoning, she’d have to sell 389 meat pies at full price every year for the rest of her life to earn enough money to retire. A daunting prospect, but it doesn’t look like her children are going to take care of her. Yvette, 48, is a burned-out schoolteacher; Raymond an unemployed longshoreman; Louis a born-again auto mechanic; Anthony a cabinetmaker like his father; Marc an architect with his own firm though no one has ever seen one of his buildings. Meantime, Joseph is an alcoholic drifter; and then there’s Grace, an underachieving lesbian, whose battered, bumper-stickered Datsun is her mother’s secret shame. Camille believes in keeping up appearances, and radical slogans and unorthodox sexuality are nothing to flaunt. Yet she loves all her offspring, sometimes fiercely, sometimes dispassionately, exactly as they are: “two unattached, three unemployed, four unholy, two unashamed, seven unhappy, and one quite unwell.” Sometimes they even love her back. There’s also old Lester Pep, whose unfailing devotion gets Camille through good days and bad. Getting mugged by her own grandson ain’t the worst of it, but nothing is going to stop Camille—or her Creole Kitchen eatery.
Thoughtful, lovingly written tale of one woman’s quiet determination to survive, from playwright and second-novelist Rawles (Love Like Gumbo, 1997, not reviewed).Pub Date: March 18, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50418-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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