An easily digestible, warmhearted tale of eye-opening friendships.
A young divorcée embarks on a journey of self-discovery during one eventful summer.
As Thayer (The Island House, 2016, etc.) opens her tale, 30-year-old Darcy Cotterill is blindsided when her ex-husband arrives in Nantucket for the summer. Not only has her ex, Boyz, brought his new wife and her 14-year-old daughter, Willow, to the island where Darcy lives year-round, they have rented the house immediately behind hers for the summer. As a woman who spends much time in her backyard garden, Darcy quickly learns more than she wanted to know about Boyz’s new family. It seems that Boyz and his wife spend precious little time supervising Willow, who has gotten involved with one of the island’s suspected drug dealers. Darcy takes matters into her own hands and befriends Willow, asserting some authority over the girl to protect her from harm. She introduces Willow to their other summer neighbors, who she hopes will be better influences. Mimi, an elderly woman who reminds Darcy of her own recently deceased grandmother, is renting the house to one side of Darcy’s, and Susan, the frazzled mother of three rambunctious boys, is renting another. Before long, this group becomes a committed foursome of friends. Under Darcy’s influence, Willow begins helping with storytime at the library instead of dabbling in drugs, babysits Susan’s frenetic kids, and acts as a companion to the elderly Mimi. As the story progresses, Darcy lands in a few confusing romantic situations of her own, and she's thankful to have these women, young and old, to help her navigate. Full of rich details about life on Nantucket, this breezy tale is at once nostalgic and hopeful. Although the prose is a bit bland, the story is filled with sweet moments of unlikely female connections.
An easily digestible, warmhearted tale of eye-opening friendships.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-96707-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
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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