Like its characters, risk averse.
Two bourgeois bohemians shake up their tepid marriage, achieving only stasis in Gaffney’s (The Goodbye Summer, 2004, etc.) innocuous latest.
It hits Dash Bateman at another interminable faculty soiree: Her husband of 20 years, Andrew, associate history professor at tiny Mason-Dixon College in D.C., is a crashing bore. Not only does he say “em” instead of “um” though he’s not British, he’s a hypochondriac, beset by allergies. When he won’t let her keep a puppy someone has abandoned in the doorway of their townhouse, Dash and dog flee to the Bateman’s pond-side country cottage. At first, Andrew is too preoccupied with campus politics to register Dash’s absence. He could win a promotion to full professor and department chair if only he’d compromise his liberal leanings by helping a right-wing colleague. Raven-haired, wasp-tongued academic Elizabeth appeals to Andrew’s baser instincts as she tries to enlist him in her Machiavellian plots. Dash studies muskrats, photographs butterflies and gets embroiled in the lives of Shevlin, the cottage handyman, his wife Cottie, a recovering heart patient, and their hunky son-in-law Owen, clearly a salt-of-the-earth foil to Andrew. Owen is not only indispensable at closet building and kitchen-cabinet refinishing, he single-handedly works an organic farm and cattle ranch, plying Dash with duck eggs and homespun bromides. Dash commutes to Washington to run her photography studio with the help of new assistant Greta, who reminds her of herself at 25, when she was (improbably) a spiky haired punkette. Preternaturally calm Chloe, the Batemans’ daughter, would mediate her parents’ estrangement if only she could identify its source. Her bafflement is shared by a couples counselor, but readers will recognize in the separation a transparent plot device: Errant spouses are tempted by infidelity, though it’s obvious neither will succumb. A trip to the hospital occasioned by folksy Cottie’s arrhythmia and Andrew’s not-so-imaginary affliction is enough to corral the principals for the inevitable happy and edifying denouement.
Like its characters, risk averse.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-38211-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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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