A capably written, genre-bending story filled with creepy-crawlies and refreshingly curious humans.
Neighborhood lore becomes a frightening reality for a young boy who dares to trespass on the property of Old Man Fischer in this debut mystery.
When pets disappear in his suburban Chicago neighborhood, 12-year-old Shane O’Conner and his classmates suspect their elderly neighbor, a miserable loner who only talks to children when he wants them off his lawn. The school bully taps Shane to investigate (or else!), but the boy’s natural curiosity leads him to a mystery set deep in the rain forest of Costa Rica, where a younger Dr. Hans Fischer lost his botanist wife on a science expedition. The son of a political prisoner in Soviet-controlled East Germany, Fischer found solace by studying insects: “The tiny world allowed me to escape my dismal childhood,” he recalls. But it was his marriage to Jillian—a kind and brilliant woman he met in school—that gave his life meaning. Now he lives alone, haunted by the events of that fateful trip to Central America. As Old Man Fischer tells his side of the story in alternating chapters, Shane gets his friends and family members to fill in the rest of the details, and the intriguing and complicated scientist who emerges shatters Shane’s first impression of the frail old man. A marked contrast between Shane’s youthful voice and Old Man Fischer’s more mature perspective effectively wraps the adult mystery in this middle-grade novel, leaving readers to wonder which of Russell’s two narrators they can truly believe. Shane is independent and brave, but he struggles at home and school. He and his younger sister, who suffers from a medical condition, are often left at a school’s child care program while their mother works in a hotel and their father, a bakery owner, chases the American dream. The scenes from Shane’s daily life feel real and relatable even as unusual events take place at Old Man Fischer’s house.
A capably written, genre-bending story filled with creepy-crawlies and refreshingly curious humans.Pub Date: May 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-615-87936-9
Page Count: 338
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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PERSPECTIVES
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