An effective, if melancholy portrait.
The bestselling author of The Horse Whisperer (1995) returns to the rugged American West for this story of a damaged family’s eventual redemption.
The surface of Evans’s latest is shaped as a mystery. Two skiers on the back trails in Montana find a body encased in ice, and it doesn’t take long for the authorities to identify her as Abbie Cooper, wanted for eco-terrorism and murder. Her parents come to claim her body: Ben from Santa Fe, where he lives with his lover Eve, Sarah from the now-empty family home in Long Island. Sarah’s cruel accusation that Ben is responsible for Abbie’s death spins the story back to when they were a happy family . . . or at least had the appearance of one. Ben was studying architecture and Sarah was in college when they met. They romanced in the usual way, married, had Abbie and Josh and moved to the ’burbs. But the façade of marital harmony shatters on Ben’s 46th birthday at the Divide, a Montana dude ranch, where he meets Eve. Everything that’s wrong with Ben and Sarah (a lot) finally becomes too much to bear. Abbie takes her parents’ split badly, and her youthful enthusiasm for saving the planet at the University of Montana turns dangerous after she meets Rolf, a cell leader for the Earth Liberation Front. When one of their fire-bombings goes wrong, Abbie and Rolf go underground to lead a quasi-criminal existence, despite her parents’ televised appeals to turn herself in. Part thriller, part family drama, the novel is at its best in the analysis of Ben and Sarah’s failed marriage. Evans examines in excruciating detail the intentional injury and petty selfishness that accompany their break-up. Abbie’s disappearance lasts for years, with the FBI still watching the Coopers. It’s up to Josh, shy and usually stoned, to bring the family some closure.
An effective, if melancholy portrait.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-399-15206-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
IN THE NEWS
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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