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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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