A cleareyed set of tales about perseverance, with strong, relatable characters and often compelling prose.
A collection of stories set in a Southern town highlights characters’ responses to setbacks.
Worsham (Going to Wings, 2017, etc.) tells quirky tales of ordinary people facing down loss—loss of innocence, loss of composure, or sometimes loss of life. The best story here, “The Second Mrs. Willis,” a coming-of-age account of a preacher’s stepdaughter, is gripping from the first sentence: “I married my English teacher because he got me pregnant. Then he got fired from his job, and now we have nothing.” The longest and most ambitious story, “The Traveling Shoe,” concerns a group of friends who watches one of their number, Maria, die slowly of cancer. When Maria’s partner, June, finds an old golf shoe beside the road and puts in another couple’s mailbox on a whim, it begins a game that eases Maria’s last days for everyone. The most curious addition, “Significant Loss,” is more like a prose poem, only a page and a half in length. Some stories are slim on plot, functioning more as character profiles, and they’re often placeless, set in towns in an unidentified state—though a few identify it as Georgia, where the author was raised. Worsham’s voice is easygoing, understated, and wry, avoiding a surfeit of metaphors and figurative language. Her images are refreshingly low-key, as when a person’s mother is described as having a “dumpy body like a pillow with a belt.” Her symbolism can be overbearing at times, though, as when the narrator of “The Traveling Shoe” finds the mate to the first golf shoe and throws it into the lake, imagining it washing up at June’s house as the latter mourns Maria’s death. Her language is occasionally imprecise, as in the phrase “large bosoms” (which should be singular in this context). However, she compensates with enough spot-on observations to fill a book of quotations, such as this from “The Washer’s Husband”: “He didn’t know then that wives could reveal things that girlfriends never could.”
A cleareyed set of tales about perseverance, with strong, relatable characters and often compelling prose.Pub Date: June 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-12148-1
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Third Lung Press
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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