Broken people with troubled pasts but good hearts, along with a crippled animal rescued from a cruel hunter, bring about romance, emotional health, and happy endings for all (including the bird)—in a long, limp, unimaginative first novel set in the Canadian Northwest. Harrison’s story never gets too far ahead of the reader, and its characters remain fairly predictable from the start (all the women are attractive, good, and wise; all the men—except for a few bird lovers—drink and do harm). Michael stumbles home to Little River Bend from the wreckage of a broken marriage and a recently completed prison term. Soon after, he comes upon the fallen form of a rare gyr falcon, just wounded by drunken rascal Ellis, who is eager to get his hands on the $2,000 a taxidermist has promised him. Shunned by the townsfolk, Michael nurses the falcon back to health as Jamie, a mute neighbor boy traumatized by the death of his father, looks on. Jamie’s mother, Susan, is intrigued by the mysterious newcomer with the cloudy past, whose communion with both boy and bird seems magical. Eventually, Susan and Michael begin an affair, this in spite of complications brought about by Coop, the town cop, who loves Susan, and by Rachel, drunken rascal Ellis’s frustrated wife. Michael, natch, must release the bird to the wild and make peace with his death father; and Rachel must let go of her past in order to realize her love for Ellis. Predictably, Jamie, at a crucial moment, ceases being a mute, and the trio heads out of Little River Bend, their inner children calmed and their futures bright. A therapeutic formula well known to perusers of The Horse Whisperer, offering few variants on that well-worn storyline. The prose isn—t especially objectionable, but Harrison’s promise is dimmed by such an uninventive debut—though probably not his sales potential.
Pub Date: Feb. 22, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-20166-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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