An engaging, modern-day Faust for brainy rockers.
In Eggenberger’s debut novel, an aging heavy-metal music fan and aspiring writer sells her soul to the devil and finds there’s a lot more to life than good and evil.
The novel’s unnamed, Scandinavian narrator has long enjoyed the freedom of being an unattached, self-described “nympho slut” and “metalhead.” However, she struggles to find time to write between shifts at her day job, and as she approaches her 47th birthday, she begins to worry that her writing career may never take off the way she’d planned and that her steady stream of young one-night stands may soon dry up. One day, as she steals a few hours to write in a Copenhagen coffee shop, a dead ringer for her favorite metal musician approaches her. She recognizes him, not as the rock icon he resembles, but as the devil himself. He offers her the promise of the writing career—and love life—she’s always dreamed of in exchange for her soul, but she’s reluctant. The devil is not accustomed to hearing “no,” and so he instead persuades her to help him destroy his wife, the biblical Lilith, before she destroys the world. As the tough-as-nails narrator’s sultry romance with the devil begins and her writing career skyrockets toward celebrity status, she finds that the real world is a lot more nuanced than the one purported by so-called moralists. The novel has distinct, well-developed feminist undertones and proves to be about much more than a powerful woman destroying another powerful woman. Fans of the long-esteemed feminist heroine Lilith may be disappointed to see her as the villain here, but she proves to be an antagonist of Maleficent-esque proportions, and readers may be torn between fearing and loving her character. Feminist readers may also be pleased to see that the tomboy narrator ultimately finds camaraderie with a well-researched group of legendary women, including the Norse goddess, Freya, and her handmaiden Fulla.
An engaging, modern-day Faust for brainy rockers.Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-9911059-0-8
Page Count: 610
Publisher: Nigel's Flight
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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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