Fans of Allen’s brand of romantic whimsy won’t mind the inconsistencies and lapses of logic, but others may cringe at the...
In Allen’s newest sugar-and-spice Southern fantasy (The Sugar Queen, 2008, etc.), a teenage girl comes to live with her grandfather in a small town where oddity is a way of life.
Raised by her selfless, politically active mother Dulcie in Boston, Emily has never met or heard about her grandfather until she comes to live with him in Mullaby, N.C., after Dulcie’s sudden death. Emily immediately confronts unexplainable peculiarities: Grandfather Vance turns out to be a shy giant over eight feet tall; the wallpaper in Emily’s room changes at will; strange white lights materialize at night in the woods outside her window; objects appear and disappear without reason. And then there are the locals’ less-than-warm memories of Dulcie. Emily makes friends with Win, a teenage boy whose family secret requires him to stay inside at night. Win tells Emily that his uncle committed suicide because Dulcie cruelly exposed his secret to the town. Grandfather Vance’s neighbor Julia, who has also befriended Emily, was Dulcie’s classmate and acknowledges that in high school Dulcie—spoiled, rich and popular—mercilessly teased Julia, then a troubled teen who dyed her hair pink and cut herself. Julia left Mullaby when she was 16 and has come back for a temporary stay only because her father died. Until she pays off his debts, she is running his barbecue restaurant, where she has added cakes and pastries to the menu. What Julia doesn’t tell Emily is that the night before she left Mullaby to attend a school for troubled girls in Baltimore, she made love with handsome preppy Sawyer and ended up pregnant. Sawyer, who assumed she had an abortion, is now pursuing Julia again, but there is a secret she has not told him. As the parallel romances of Emily and Win and Julia and Sawyer evolve, the secrets of Mullaby become sources of happiness rather than pain.
Fans of Allen’s brand of romantic whimsy won’t mind the inconsistencies and lapses of logic, but others may cringe at the implausibility.Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-553-80721-9
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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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