“Seems pretty cool!” according to a high school sophomore, surely the target market for these high jinks.
Dude! You won’t believe this! An interactive novel updates the world’s most awesome romance with new characters, plotlines, slang, puzzles, illustrations, and a cookie recipe.
The best way to explain how this “choose your own path” rendition of Shakespeare’s hoary old play works is to show you. This, for example, is section No. 155: “You look up to the balcony. A light is on inside! 'But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?' you whisper.…A naked old dude steps out from the light onto the balcony.…His naughty bits are dangling in the breeze....'AW GROSS, I THINK THAT’S HER DAD,' you say, moving away to investigate another balcony. 'NICE WEEN THOUGH.' " Then you choose one of these options: “Examine the nearby stone balcony: turn to 109” or “Examine some other balcony instead: turn to 167." If you choose 109, you’ll be seeing a wrinkled old lady in a nightgown—her mom. If you choose 167, you’ll find the superhot mega-babe you met at that party last night. Then you make another choice, and so it goes, flipping back and forth through the book, until you come to one of more than a hundred different endings, each featuring an illustration by a dream team of cartoonists. You can choose to be Romeo or Juliet—TEAM MONTAGUE or TEAM CAPULET—and depending on your choices, you may go to brunch with Benvolio at The Merchant of Breakfast, visit Ophelia in Denmark, or trade dumb sex puns with Mercutio…and you don’t necessarily have to die in the end! One of the options is to actually become Juliet’s glove—though sadly, “gloves are not capable of sentient thought.” North, who funded the first of these books (To Be or Not To Be, 2013) with a Kickstarter, has scattered the entire text of the play among the 474 numbered sections.
“Seems pretty cool!” according to a high school sophomore, surely the target market for these high jinks.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-98330-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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