Banks follows The Sweet Hereafter (1991) with this in-the- hero's-own-words tale of an upstate New York teenager who has trouble aplenty with parents, drugs, and desperados. Chappie Dorset is 14 and ``heavy into weed'' when he starts his life of crime: caught stealing, he cuts out, leaving behind his divorced mother, pet cat, and the vile stepfather who's been weaseling his own sexual pleasures from the boy for a considerable time. And therewith begins a long and coincidence-driven tale as Chappie is loosed upon the world. Imprisoned by a grand-larcenous gang who think he's double-crossed them, he barely escapes a raging fire that, like Huck Finn, leaves people believing him dead. Amid occasional philosophizings about the difference between the illegal and the criminal (drugs seem generally to be the first, not second), Chappie changes his name to Bone (he gets crossed bones tattooed on his arm), after which there's a period of hiding, a second encounter with a child pornographer, a largish theft from same, and, by luck, friendship with I-Man, a gently philosophic (and ganja-smoking) Rastafarian from Jamaica who, when he returns to his family (and his drug business) on that island paradise, is accompanied by Bone. What Bone finds in Jamaica includes drugs (raising, sale, use, and export), deaths (some by Uzi), sex, mysticism, initiation rites, crime, and, not least, Bone's real father, a more slimy piece of work than Huck's Pa ever was. Near the end of his year or so of travel, danger, and discovery, Bone remarks on ``how different I was now from how I was then''; and while all will agree that he's more experienced, they may not agree that Bone is much changed as he arranges ``to come back to the States and lead a normal life and get my shit together for the future.'' As has often been the case with Banks: ambitious voyaging, but, in spite of its distances, mainly on the surface. (First printing of 100,000; $150,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-017275-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
Refreshingly filled with love rather than sex, this coming-of-age novel examines the human cost of political repression.
A star-crossed romance captures the turmoil of pre-revolutionary Iran in Seraji’s debut.
From the rooftops of Tehran in 1973, life looks pretty good to 17-year-old Pasha Shahed and his friend Ahmed. They’re bright, funny and good-looking; they’re going to graduate from high school in a year; and they’re in love with a couple of the neighborhood girls. But all is not idyllic. At first the girls scarcely know the boys are alive, and one of them, Zari, is engaged to Doctor—not actually a doctor but an exceptionally gifted and politically committed young Iranian. In this neighborhood, the Shah is a subject of contempt rather than veneration, and residents fear SAVAK, the state’s secret police force, which operates without any restraint. Pasha, the novel’s narrator and prime dreamer, focuses on two key periods in his life: the summer and fall of 1973, when his life is going rather well, and the winter of 1974, when he’s incarcerated in a grim psychiatric hospital. Among the traumatic events he relates are the sudden arrest, imprisonment and presumed execution of Doctor. Pasha feels terrible because he fears he might have inadvertently been responsible for SAVAK having located Doctor’s hiding place; he also feels guilty because he’s always been in love with Zari. She makes a dramatic political statement, setting herself on fire and sending Pasha into emotional turmoil. He is both devastated and further worried when the irrepressible Ahmed also seems to come under suspicion for political activity. Pasha turns bitterly against religion, raising the question of God’s existence in a world in which the bad guys seem so obviously in the ascendant. Yet the badly scarred Zari assures him, “Things will change—they always do.”
Refreshingly filled with love rather than sex, this coming-of-age novel examines the human cost of political repression.Pub Date: May 5, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-451-22681-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
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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