An inspiring adventure with a strong heroine.
In Conner’s first novel, a young woman starts seeing visions, changing her world forever.
Aliyah’s existence is a peaceful one. In her junior year of high school in a quiet town, she’s supported by a loving single mother, good friends, and a church community. Only one thing disturbs her: her dreams. They seem so real that they’re nearly visions, and she doesn’t understand what they mean. With the help of Pastor Mike, her church’s leader, and his foster son, Jesse, Aliyah begins to come to terms with her gift. It takes a great tragedy for her to meet Jesus and truly understand her special purpose on Earth, though the grief she feels in the aftermath threatens to overwhelm her trust in the divine plan. She’s pulled back into using her gift in the service of a friend, after which a series of dramatic events unfolds. Pastor Mike and Jesse also work in the service of God in special ways, as Aliyah learns, and she begins to refine her understanding of her gifts in their company. “You will have to choose to see the light,” Pastor Mike tells her when she’s in the grip of horrible dreams. “God has already chosen you, but you have to do your part to follow His light. Just remember that His light is more powerful than the dark; always. You don’t ever have to be afraid.” Though many influential men are present in Aliyah’s life, she is an effective and positive force in the world. Her blossoming romance with Jesse is cut short by his graduation, when they decide they both need to see what God wants them to be before they proceed, leaving Aliyah refreshingly undefined by romance. Conner’s novel is ideal for teenagers who, preferring their reading both religious and exciting, are ready for discussions about the light and dark at play in all our lives.
An inspiring adventure with a strong heroine.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4908-5190-7
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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