Old-fashioned and earnest, with a gentle touch that’s appealing.
A carefully crafted first novel about doomed lovers in 1930s Minnesota.
Isobel, a hatmaker, marries a tailor, Victor Howard, and their little shop prospers, even during the Great Depression. Victor is coarse but cheerful, unlike his introverted wife, who cares patiently for their three children and dreams of trying her hand at millinery again. But who would buy beautiful hats in the small town of Cypress? No one, she’s sure—until glamorous Cathryn Malley from Chicago sweeps through the shop’s door. Isobel and Cathryn become friends, even though the shy hatmaker remains in awe of her loquacious—and lonely—new friend. Cathryn’s husband, Liam Malley, is a mining engineer who’s away for weeks on end, traveling through Minnesota’s bleak Iron Range, and Isobel’s husband happens to be away as well, vacationing with their children on a tiny lake island he bought for a song. On their own for the summer, the women confide in each other and make hats according to Cathryn’s whims and big-city notions of style. Until, that is, Cathryn falls for the singular charms of Jack Reese, a forest ranger and brooding romantic with a getaway island of his own. Their passionate affair both fascinates and troubles Isobel, who frequently helps them, serving as go-between or allaying Liam Malley’s inevitable suspicions, keeping her silence even when Liam explains that Cathryn is mentally unstable and suicidal. And then the lovers vanish after a forest fire burns Jack’s cabin to the ground, and no bodies are ever found. Did Liam kill his wayward wife and her paramour? Or did Jack hurt Cathryn somehow, as his last letter seemed to imply? Did they simply run away? Throughout the many ensuing years, Isobel hopes against hope that her flamboyant friend is happy somewhere, until finally, on her deathbed, a recurring dream reveals the truth at last, confirmed by her grown son.
Old-fashioned and earnest, with a gentle touch that’s appealing.Pub Date: March 7, 2001
ISBN: 0-316-81583-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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