Newcomer Wallace, a former attorney, is more concerned with romance than the law in her fast-paced but shakily plotted first novel. LuAnn Hagerdorn is a daddy's girl whose great act of rebellion was marrying Eddie, a liberal political cartoonist, and moving from hometown Tallagumsa, Alabama—where her family still lives—to Atlanta. The other Hagerdorns include LuAnn's sister, Jane (who's unable to conceive and covets LuAnn and Eddie's four-year-old daughter, Jessie), long-suffering mother Gladys, and LuAnn's father, the imperious Newell Hagerdorn, Tallagumsa's mayor, most prominent citizen, and now front runner for governor. When Newell makes LuAnn (home with a reluctant Eddie for a routine ceremony in Newell's honor) a gift of the Tallagumsa Steak House, a local institution, only LuAnn doesn't realize that it's a bribe to get her back to Alabama, where she can be an asset to Newell's campaign. Largely because LuAnn's pregnant with twins and money is tight, Eddie agrees to a year's trial period in small-town hell; but, even though he gets a great job at the university and a syndication contract to boot, he hadn't bargained on the entry of Ben Gainey into his—and his wife's—life. When LuAnn meets this big-shot reporter who's at work on a book about the New South, sparks fly; and when Ben and LuAnn discover a shocking truth about the never-solved 1963 murder of two black students on their way to integrate the state university, Eddie is left out of the picture. With Newell surfacing as the crime's prime suspect, lives are thrown into turmoil, and it'll take all of LuAnn's reserves of gumption to not only save her marriage but to come to terms both with her father's role in the 30-year-old mystery and her own family history. The trial itself, though, is anticlimactic (Newell has a skeleton in his closet, but he's no killer), leaving the reader with a case of Courtroom Lite. Convoluted and mildly engaging at best.
Pub Date: Nov. 9, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-13571-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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