The heavily hyped first novel by English screenwriter Evans, who was advanced $3 million for his efforts, offers no surprisesand all the advantages of a formulaic plot. Annie Graves, the 43-year-old, hard-nosed British editor of a glossy New York magazine, is distracted from her dull marriage and hectic career by a freak accident upstate. Her teenaged daughter, Grace, has been hit by a truck and very nearly killed while riding horseback in a snowstorm. The girl loses a leg, and although horse Pilgrim survives in one piece, the accident turns him into a mad beast beyond anyone's control. Annie, stubborn in her insistence that no real tragedy can ever befall her, refuses to have Pilgrim put out of his misery and becomes obsessed with restoring the animal to health as a way of showing Grace that life can go on as before. She's heard stories of ``whisperers''charmers who can calm the wildest horsesand eventually finds one, Montana rancher Tom Booker. At first, Tom wants nothing to do with Annie, whom he sees as a pushy, rich, shallow East Coast cutout, or with Pilgrim, who seems beyond his help. But Annie won't give up: She packs Pilgrim into a trailer and drives him and Grace out to the Montana backwoods and throws herself at Tom's mercy. This sojourn in the wild, of course, has as much to do with the direction of Annie's life as it has for Grace's or Pilgrim's, and Tom, like all good Christ figures, is able to expel the demons of all who cross his path before he meets his own unhappy end. By that time, however, everyone has been healed—even Annie. This well-paced equine edition of The Miracle Worker, with a story obvious to the point of allegory, is not long on suspense. And the prose (``When they kissed, it seemed to Annie she was coming home'') adds little by way of depth. Pretty pale altogether, then, but the publisher will find a large, ready-made audience among devotees of New Age-style romance. (First printing of 600,000; film rights to Hollywood Pictures; Literary Guild main selection)
Pub Date: Sept. 6, 1995
ISBN: 0-385-31523-6
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
IN THE NEWS
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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