Keen insights into sex, love and coming to terms with one’s own unruly imperfections. A winner.
Thirtysomethings meet, don’t quite couple, then retreat into a steamy, increasingly revealing correspondence in this quirky epistolary novel.
It’s a collaboration between short-story writer Almond (My Life in Heavy Metal, 2001, etc.) and chick-lit author Baggott (The Madam, 2003, etc.). Their creations are John and Jane, who meet at a wedding, check each other out, then tumble into a coat closet, unbuttoning and panting, until he backs off, and they subsequently agree to become better acquainted by exchanging detailed “confessions” at a safe distance (she’s in Philadelphia, he’s in New York). The episodic results are sexy, funny and touching. In alternating chapters bridged by combative responses and queries, we learn of John’s high-school romance with Rubenesque Jodi; a summer-camp-counseling fling extended into a lingering affair with an “older woman” (of 24); and gratifying dalliances with a Latina bombshell and a single mom who’s also an accomplished pastry chef. Jane’s confessions disclose a teenage relationship with Mohawk-bedecked Michael, a collegiate whirl with a semi-dashing (and clueless) rich guy (“It was like he was a country with his own anthem”), an affair with erotically versatile married swingers and engagement to a virtually perfect gentleman who won’t open up and let her inside his world of guarded family secrets. Acting on the shared conviction that “Every famous case of love boils down to reckless honesty,” they meet (literally) halfway, confront each other’s evasions and hangups and seem ready for the closet again, as The Curtain Falls. All’s well that doesn’t end after all, and the contented reader anticipates (what both Jane and John would have wittily, mercilessly mocked) something very like a future for these two bright, screwed-up, engaging oddballs.
Keen insights into sex, love and coming to terms with one’s own unruly imperfections. A winner.Pub Date: April 28, 2006
ISBN: 1-56512-443-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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