Jolly ho-down spoiled by sermonizing.
Addled Texas socialite hits rock bottom.
When Blythe Young marries big Texas money, she thinks she’s set for life. As Mrs. Trey Biggs-Dix, Blythe can say adios to her blue-collar childhood. She quickly adapts to her new lavish life and learns to hold her own with the big-haired, big spending social X-rays in her universe. Just as Blythe’s getting comfortable in her Jimmy Choo shoes and Ralph Rucci satin suits, her mother-in-law sets the wheels in motion to excommunicate Blythe from the esteemed Biggs-Dix clan. When it’s all over, she is left penniless, dependent on drugs and booze with nary a friend. Blythe knows she’s really hit the depths when she’s reduced to calling on her old college chum, Millie, for help. Despite being left in the dust when Blythe was enjoying the high life, Millie happily welcomes Blythe into her modest home. Millie resides just where Blythe left her—back in a shoddy University of Texas house filled with outcasts. Millie now runs the ramshackle abode—it serves as home base for Millie’s philanthropic operations and personal ministries. This Good Samaritan refuses to listen to those around her telling her that Blythe is nothing but trouble. Sure enough, she embroils the house in one scandal after the next. Blythe’s outrageously selfish behavior may cost Millie and her housemates their home. To put things right, Blythe’s going to have to pull off her biggest scam yet. Bird (The Flamenco Academy, 2006, etc.) delivers big laughs with her spot-on examination of Texas’s high falutin’ ladies; reading about Blythe’s antics is pure, wicked fun. Sadly, this naughty treat turns mushy sweet when Bird begins to moralize. The righteous ending is unexpected—and tough to accept in a book otherwise devoted to camp and cattiness.
Jolly ho-down spoiled by sermonizing.Pub Date: June 12, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-26828-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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