A beckoning slice of life.
A migratory mother flirts with stability in first-timer Donner’s strongly realized novel of place.
Elaine is the widow behind the wheel, forever tucking daughters Hannah and Daisy into her rattletrap Datsun, their drowsy eyes opening on 11 seedy homes in just three years. Now, in the summer of 1983, the girls find themselves in LA, outside the harshly misnamed Sunset Terrace, a complex of six low-rent apartments colonized by single mothers—true “characters” all—and vivified by the children they’ve raised on cheese wieners and cherry soda. Nomads no more—so they hope—the family dares to put down its roots. Their obstacles are many. Elaine, a college-educated short-order cook, struggles to find work (one job has her squeezing whipped cream into endless pastry swans) and to make peace with the ghost of her husband, a cellist whose slow slide into dementia ended in suicide. The brooding Hannah, meanwhile, favors her pet turtle over her mother and little sister. But all changes with the introduction of Bridget, a sassy, scabby nine-year-old who, when she’s not shoplifting, chants lewd ditties from her perch atop a chain-link fence. Hannah and her mother quickly attach themselves to the waif, for different reasons, and a warm if precarious harmony ensues. Donner, who so well limns her novel’s sass, falls short in development of suspense: the jealousy that results in Bridget’s gruesome end is too faintly evidenced. This needn’t, however, deter readers from the author’s true gift, which emerges out of a deep sense of place; her Sunset Terrace approaches the snug communality of another shabby setting, that of the houseboat dwellers in Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore, adhering to the memory with a shrieking of gulls and a dappling of sun on cinderblock. We see through the smoke of Virginia Slims many heartfelt characters, hear through the buzz of their gossip many familiar longings.
A beckoning slice of life.Pub Date: May 21, 2003
ISBN: 1-931561-34-6
Page Count: 324
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
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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