Nice Mary Alice Baker gets involved with all sorts of nasty terrorists in this Saturday-matinee serial for the '90s. One day, Mary Alice is a normal California girl—abusive father, dead-end job snapping photos of tiny tots at Hansel and Gretel, shiftless boyfriend named Wrex with the same Doc Martens, leather jacket, and tattoos as everybody else's boyfriend. Then Wrex asks her to run an errand at the Los Angeles Airport—to swap a package he's got for another that's coming in at noon. Mary Alice has the requisite misgivings, but Wrex will go as high as $200 for the favor, and ``the more I drank, the safer the whole idea sounded.'' So Mary Alice agrees to make the swap, except a few things go wrong, and bang! the package blows up while she's still in LAX, sending her into hiding from (1) the local (and not-so-local) authorities; (2) Mike Fleischer, the mysterious buyer who never liked amateur couriers to start with and is sure this one has double-crossed him; (3) Frick and Frack, Fleischer's bullyboys, whose good terrorist/bad terrorist routine reminds Mary Alice of nobody so much as her father; and, for all she knows, (4) from the rotten apple among the bevy of exciting new friends she's met since transforming herself into pop-art photographer Nina Zero. There's demented filmmaker Cass, her randy painter friend Billy b, colorful Santa Monica gallery owner Bobby Easter, and a pair of private eyes named Ben and Jerry. All this sounds a lot more fun than it is, because the cheerfully crazy characters Mary Alice—sorry: Nina—meets aren't all that different from one another, the terrorist plot is familiar and featherweight, and Mary Alice's self-styled ``Confession of an Accidental Terrorist'' lacks a style as flagrantly goofy as the events it retails, probably because even as Nina Zero, Mary Alice remains invincibly nice. Eversz (False Profit, 1990, etc.) whips up a candy-colored terrorist parfait in which the copious blood might as well be strawberry sauce.
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8021-1582-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1996
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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