The author of Mother Rocket (1993), winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award, disappoints in this debut Love Storylike novel of a poor New Haven girl who marries a rich Yale boy only to lose him to a fatal illness. Rosa Salvatore would love to disown her blue-collar roots in New Haven's Pizza Beach, an Italian-American enclave of colorful gossips, priests, housewives, and storytellers, but Rosa's own looks, manner, and firmly implanted neuroses loudly proclaim where she came from and what she's likely to become. Now grown up and a social worker at Yale New Haven Hospital, Rosa dreams of a more mainstream future, but like her mother she expects it to arrive in the form of the right non-Italian man. Mr. Right duly appears in the guise of Gary Fisher, a wealthy Jewish law student from Long Island whose irrepressible motormouth and vaguely suspicious relationship with his domineering mother piques Rosa's interest. Having met over an indigent patient's case at the hospital, Rosa and Gary fall in love on the strength of shared physical ailments (he has allergies, she has a spastic colon), and a shared longing to turn their backs on their parents and start anew. Despite the obvious difficulties of melding his liberal, nonreligious family with her conservative, Catholic clan, the couple marry—only to find that the state of matrimony has destroyed their sexual passion and left them with nothing to talk about. The doldrums are interrupted when Rosa suffers a miscarriage and disappear altogether when Gary learns he has terminal cancer. The final scenes, in which Rosa sits by Gary's hospital bed wondering how she'll live without this obnoxious guy, are the most affecting, but they come too late to excite enough sympathy or interest. Ciresi's irreverent sense of humor and sharp eye for ethnic detail raise this story above Love Story's schmaltz, but her bland, unreflective characters just don't capture the reader's heart.
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 1996
ISBN: 0-88001-515-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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