An angry, once-abused woman painter almost disintegrates, then experiences a last-minute healing in an equally abused placemid- 70s Haiti: the emotional, scattershot newest from Trinidadian-born Guy (My Love, My Love, or the Peasant Girl, 1985, etc.) Jonnie Dash, a beautiful African-American artist, having sold a painting for a half-million dollars (an interesting but never explained event) goes to Haiti to see her old lover and Pygmalion, GÇrard. GÇrard was married when she first met him years before in an interracial salon in New York; now that he's widowed and available, though, Jonnie is no longer sure she loves him. Troubled by painful memories and disturbing blackouts, she flees to her favorite hotel in Haiti. Like one of those generic airport, airplane, and ship settings, this ``old Hotel'' is frequented by a range of characters whom Jonnie seduces, befriends, attacks, and fears. It's the Watergate era, which gives Jonnie a chance not only to pontificate on the infamy of the US and obnoxious Americans abroad, but on Haitian and African history as well. She also recalls her life as an orphan, her rape by a Catholic priest, life on New York streets, the drawings of sexual organs that made her famous, a failed marriage, and a son shot and killed by the police as he ran away from a bungled burglary. Amid all this are encounters with sinister Haitians and arrogant whites; raunchy sex with Stephan, toy-boy of wealthy friend Jessica; pursuit by a nasty foreign service officer who uses the notorious Tonton Macoute to help him find Lucknair, the small boy he's in love with; puzzling deaths; and the improbable rescue of Lucknair that, together with Jonnie's affair with a black revolutionary, will apparently save her. Somewhere within this clutter of melodramatic action and attitude there lurks an interesting heroine with an interesting story to tell, but, sadly, she's not easy to find.
Pub Date: Sept. 21, 1995
ISBN: 0-525-24780-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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