A winning trifecta for cozy enthusiasts: a ghost story, a murder mystery, and a fresh romance.
A spirit supposedly haunts a run-down house in New Hampshire in this novel.
In Marini’s (Schmuel’s Journey, 2015, etc.) sequel, new couple Sam Miller and Martha Sanborn wonder why her brother, Bart, and his ne’er-do-well childhood friend Auggie Raymond bought the old “Ocean Born Mary House,” a firetrap in Henniker that has long stood vacant. The year is 1975, and the first-time homeowners explain they want to exploit the house’s alleged ghost, Mary Wilson Wallace, by offering tours and selling souvenirs to spirit hunters and academics interested in the occult. In 1720, Mary was born on an oceangoing ship off the coast of New England. Centuries later, people say her apparition inhabits the house. The storyline seesaws from 1975 to emerald-eyed Mary’s shipboard birth, her wedding, her death at age 94 in the Henniker house, and her descendants through three centuries. When a green-eyed woman claiming to be the secret illegitimate daughter of one of those descendants visits Bart, he fears his paranormal enterprise may experience a hiccup. Ghostly activity in the house causes nerves to jangle, but it’s the corpse in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor that produces true fear. Newborn Mary’s discovery on the ship by a pirate called Don Pedro, who allowed her and the others onboard to live as he and his men plundered the vessel, and various other past tales add richness to the story. But some historical accounts fall flat; when the elderly Don Pedro introduces himself to Mary when she is 68, there is little payoff. Italicizing is inconsistent—italics are used for internal monologues, emphasis, signage, correspondence, and event summaries. References to TV Detective Joe Friday working a case and the “aw-shucks grin” of actor Gary Cooper seem corny even in a book set in the mid-’70s, and the recap of the first installment of the series is clunky. But ghostly elements add shivers, and the reason for the murder provides a welcome twist. Another positive element: the realistic pains and promise of Martha and Sam’s new relationship.
A winning trifecta for cozy enthusiasts: a ghost story, a murder mystery, and a fresh romance.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61950-312-0
Page Count: 191
Publisher: Gypsy Shadow Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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