An often engaging, lightly fictionalized life of America’s first saint.
A dramatization of the life of the much-beloved 19th-century saint Mother Frances X. Cabrini.
Gregory’s debut novel tells Cabrini’s life story, starting with her girlhood in the 1860s in the northern Italian town of Sant’Angelo Lodigiano and the deaths of her parents in 1870. She took religious vows some years later, founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart, and arrived in the United States in 1889. As the story goes on, Cabrini and her fellow sisters go on to found dozens of missions and hospitals, mostly with the aim of aiding poor and destitute children, including many from the flood of Italian immigrants hitting major American cities toward the end of the 19th century. Pope Pius XII canonized Cabrini in 1946, and she became the patron saint of immigrants. All these events, of course, naturally lend themselves to hagiography, but Gregory largely and refreshingly resists that temptation. Her version of Cabrini is a winningly human creation with a kind heart, a sharp mind, and a mordant sense of humor. That said, the narrative sometimes reads more like an encyclopedia entry than a work of immersive fiction (“She was in America, where, now at age fifty-four, she demonstrated her skills as a shrewd and successful businesswoman”). But the book’s gentle fictional touches— fleshing out quotes from real-life letters as dialogue, indulging in vivid descriptions of scenery—compensate for its drier patches, and it wonderfully portrays Cabrini’s cheerful pluck and courage. Indeed, Gregory seems to appreciate the more worldly aspects of her main character, who stares down corrupt realtors or cowardly city officials with an irresistible moral clarity. Cabrini’s many devotees around the world will likely love the author’s work here.
An often engaging, lightly fictionalized life of America’s first saint.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-947431-02-7
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Barbera Foundation
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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