An entertaining, immersive jaunt with a formidable protagonist.
In this short story, Keating’s (Reagan Country, 2018, etc.) recurring cleric Stephen Grant steps up to help a popular comic-book creator targeted by armed assailants.
Grant, the pastor at St. Mary’s Lutheran Church on New York’s Long Island, agrees to attend a locally held comics convention with assistant pastor Zack Charmichael. The first night of the event involves a lifetime achievement award ceremony for writer and artist Wes Jenkins, whose work Zack greatly admires. Zack and Stephen’s after-dinner encounter with Wes and his wife, Kelly, turns out to be fortuitous for everyone when Stephen, a former Navy SEAL and CIA operative, thwarts would-be killers brandishing shotguns. The attack may be a reaction to Wes’ recent article criticizing the comic industry’s leftist slant. Wes, who co-founded J&H Comic Publishing with Simon Huck, says that he just wants to tell good stories, but some have taken exception to his work’s apparent conservatism, sometimes expressed through biblical allegories. Protesters make their presence known during the con’s next two days. When kidnappers eventually abduct someone, Stephen is quickly on their trail, and he has plenty of help—a convention’s worth of superheroes. The series’ protagonist remains a man of action even though the story isn’t novel-length. This relatively short piece is lighter in tone than previous outings, due mainly to its concentration on the cheery setting. Keating respectfully portrays the con as a mostly enjoyable experience—even though Zack is the only true comic-book aficionado. The story’s point of view is unmistakably conservative, but it doesn’t portray some characters’ extreme views as being typical leftist beliefs. Despite the story’s brevity, it manages to flesh out new characters, such as Wes and Kelly, although the mystery isn’t too difficult to puzzle out. Much of the comedy is appropriate to the setting, as when people assume that the pastors’ clerical garments are costumes honoring the real-life comic-book series Preacher.
An entertaining, immersive jaunt with a formidable protagonist.Pub Date: June 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-71888-161-7
Page Count: 82
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2018
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
BOOK REVIEW
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PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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