Neither funny nor insightful enough to rise above the crowd of similar plots.
Pennebaker’s first novel attempts to join the recession-hit chic-lit mini-boomlet with her comedy about an Austin, Texas, divorcée struggling to live under one roof with her adolescent daughter and aging mother.
About to turn 50, Joanie has still not fully adjusted to her divorce two years earlier from lawyer Richard. In fact, she’s sworn off sex all together. Given that this is supposedly a book about hard times, Joanie’s financial situation, even how much Richard is paying in child support, remains vague. After having unbelievably little trouble getting an ad-agency job after years as a stay-at-home mom, she evinces only disdain for the actual work, not to mention her much younger colleagues, and only limited concern over job security. Meanwhile, her personal life is one irritation after another. Her 15-year-old daughter Caroline has turned typically adolescent: impatient, hostile, secretive and mildly rebellious. Not so much unpopular as invisible to her high-school peers, Caroline experiments with cigarettes, pot and wildly dyed hair but remains basically a good girl. Joanie’s aging mother Ivy, who has had to leave her West Texas home and move in with Joanie for financial reasons, is outspoken in disparaging both daughter and granddaughter, and although she’s supposed to be a reactionary shrew, her criticism seems pretty accurate. Her intolerance covers aching loneliness, and the novel’s best scene occurs when Caroline and her only friend bake pot brownies that Ivy devours à la mode. As Ivy’s health fails, Joanie’s brother, Ivy’s blatant favorite, doesn’t visit or lift a finger to help. Richard announces that his much younger girlfriend is expecting a baby and then is out of town on business the rest of the novel. Pennebaker’s male characters are so undeveloped that even in their villainy they seem irrelevant. The novel’s one half-decent guy, Joanie’s co-worker, becomes a lukewarm love interest at best. Eventually, of course, female camaraderie is achieved among the three generations.
Neither funny nor insightful enough to rise above the crowd of similar plots.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-425-23856-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
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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