A clever, riveting, and multifaceted tale about sailing, so vivid that readers should taste the salt spray.
A debut historical novel captures life on the ocean waves in the late 19th century.
For the uninitiated, a downeaster is a fast, medium-size clipper ship, designed to carry cargo. The year is 1872, and the downeaster featured here is The Providence, anchored in Bath, Maine. The captain of the ship is Isaac Griffin, one of the tale’s three central characters. Griffin, a man down on his luck, faces a choice: bankruptcy or the financially beneficial yet desperately perilous journey around Cape Horn. To complicate matters, a fire severely burned his hand during a previous voyage (“pain shrieked from the damaged tendons and injured nerve endings”). The opening of the story points to a classic “Horn run” adventure with storms, curses, and sea shanties aplenty. On this front, the storyline does not disappoint, yet it is further bolstered by the author’s fastidious charting of his characters’ psychological development. With regard to Nicholas Priest in particular, the novel develops into a well-wrought bildungsroman. A victim of a brutal hazing at his boarding school, where he was tied to a tree in the freezing cold, the young Nicholas is first seen at the elbow of his father, weak and with breathing difficulties. His father’s kill-or-cure solution for him turns out to be a sea voyage. Nicholas’ personal journey into manhood, punctuated by courageousness and healing, becomes one of the most vivid strands in an elaborately woven narrative. The third, yet by no means least important, of the three central characters is the green-eyed nurse Kayleigh MacKenna. MacKenna’s story, a refreshing addition, allows the author to explore 19th-century women’s rights and attempts to perceive the era from a female aesthetic. How each of these distinct narrative threads becomes interwoven is part of the joy of reading this witty, vigorous book. In terms of style, each sentence, elegantly composed, embodies sufficient ruggedness to capture the fervor of a life spent at sea: “The wind had been steady and brisk from southwest and south. Large waves crested with white foam rolled atop sides carved rough with gouges. These made Providence behave like a young stallion racing, absorbed and satisfied by the joy of its own physicality.” Inspired by the close scrutiny of ships’ logs of the age, this historically accurate, engrossing account will likely appeal to seasoned seadogs and landlubbers alike.
A clever, riveting, and multifaceted tale about sailing, so vivid that readers should taste the salt spray.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61179-331-4
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Fireship Press
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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