The novel tackles important cultural and historical issues but lacks emotional depth.
A Sikh boy from a small African town becomes a global rock star in Michaels’ novel.
Dayal Singh, an Asian Sikh and the son of trafficked parents, grows up in Arusha, Tanzania. When Dayal is a child, someone gives his school a broken piano, which fascinates the boy. Later, he gets a chance to buy a piano of his own and immediately starts taking lessons. His love of music leads him to study the subject as one of his minors in college—he auditions for a music program at a school in Switzerland and gets into the orchestra. At school, he meets Peter van Heusen, Oscar Martinez, and Adam Boulanger; together, they start a band that ends up taking off (“That summer, in eight weeks, we visited forty cities in Europe”). Dayal tries to plan for his future, but his father wants him to marry a Sikh woman. Ever since he was a teenager, Dayal has been in love with Mara Glazer, a Jewish girl eight years his senior and the granddaughter of the man who bought Dayal’s father. As Dayal’s band gets bigger and bigger, he aims to settle down with a partner and agrees to an arranged marriage, but through the rocky next years of his life, his feelings never change—he remains madly in love with Mara. Taking place from the 1980s to the early 2000s, the novel reads like a fictional autobiography. Michaels demonstrates a command of history and provides a detailed look into African and Sikh culture across the decades, but the fast-paced narration only seems to work against this approach. Because much of the story is conveyed as a summary of events, readers may have difficulty forming a connection with any of the characters. Dayal is likely on the spectrum (which is mentioned once and briefly) and identifies as demisexual.
The novel tackles important cultural and historical issues but lacks emotional depth.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9798218241698
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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