While not every moment is captivating, this uplifting tale shows how ideas can transform lives.
A novel focuses on a spiritually ambitious power couple.
Peter Donovan is a 29-year-old stockbroker in New York City. In the opening pages, his 25-year-old wife, Amy, decides to leave him. She has taken up with a man in their apartment building. Peter uses this momentous event as an opportunity: He heads to a retreat in California. It is there that he learns to meditate and meets Stella Cornfield, an acquaintance of an investment banker. Stella is also recently single and on a spiritual journey of her own. When the two return to the East Coast, they connect and end up forming a couple. Both are successful and wealthy, yet they yearn for something more from life. They find themselves engrossed by the works of authors like Khalil Gibran and Neville Goddard. Both are also troubled by their former lovers. Amy seems bent on a downward spiral since her breakup with Peter and asks for help. Stella’s ex-boyfriend Marty Chen sues her on baseless grounds. Her lawyer demands that Marty donate $1 million to a charity of Stella’s choosing. Stella then decides to use the money to create something special with Peter. It is a decision that will ultimately benefit everyone. Zahr’s story is at its best when exploring the finer points of Peter’s and Stella’s beliefs. Goddard’s ideas receive particular attention and even influence Stella’s views on her health. Readers are shown firsthand just how one can take concepts and put them into action. But the dialogue that propels the tale tends to be less illuminating. Characters often express themselves with bland sentiments. For instance, Peter says of Amy early on: “I’m not eager to take her back nor do I miss her company.” At a later point, one character flatly asks another: “What are your plans for this weekend?” Nevertheless, the book makes philosophical concepts relatable. Though they exist in a work of fiction, the intriguing characters change in ways that demonstrate the true power of their convictions.
While not every moment is captivating, this uplifting tale shows how ideas can transform lives.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-951933-82-1
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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