A controlled, haunting tale of abuse and betrayal.
In Blanchard’s debut novella, a young farm girl experiences multiple traumas.
Nine-year-old Liz Walters has been sent on a mission by her 10-year-old best friend, Stefanie Jacobson, to scout out the playground at the shuttered school near the Walters’ Western Massachusetts farm. Liz looks up to Stefanie, whose wealthy family moved to the area from Boston, and will do almost anything the other girl suggests. The friends hope to use the partially disassembled playground as a training course for “ninja games,” but when Liz tries to swing on a swing-set bar by herself, she gets stuck and wets her pants. Her 20-year-old cousin Joey, who happens to be nearby, gets her unstuck, but their past interactions have often made her uncomfortable: “When she was five and he was sixteen, he told her to look in his pockets for money….Sometimes, during those ‘magic tricks,’ she’d been vaguely aware of another bulge, in his lap.” When they get back to the farm, Liz learns that her heifer, Belle, will be bred by a bull on a neighboring farm, and her parents say that she’ll have to be present to watch and learn what the breeding process is like. While Stefanie gets her own pony, Liz is forced to witness a brutal side of animal husbandry. After that, the young girl has another terrible experience involving Joey. Blanchard’s prose is precise and economical, carefully delineating the different worlds that Liz and Stefanie inhabit, as when Liz’s mother tells her that she can’t invite Stefanie to Belle’s breeding: “She’s not from a farm family, she wouldn’t understand….This is family business. Farm business.” Liz is a well-drawn and compelling protagonist, which makes her many trials that much harder for the reader to stomach. The other characters, too, are smartly constructed, adding to the tale’s believability. This is a dark story that clearly telegraphs where it’s going, goes there in detail, and lingers on the aftermath. The ending is perhaps not quite as skillful as what comes before it, but overall, Liz’s experience provides a damning look at the ways that people refuse to see what they don’t want to see.
A controlled, haunting tale of abuse and betrayal.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2020
ISBN: 979-8-56-493854-9
Page Count: 59
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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