Tepid sitcom from the prolific Margolis (Apocalipstick, 2003, etc). Not one of her best.
Low-wattage Bridget Jones knock-off about a young Irishwoman who finds love and professional advancement once she breaks a few rules.
Dubliner Cyn Fishbein is too nice for her own good. Thirty-two and single, she works as a junior copywriter at a “cutting edge” ad agency and hangs out with her pals: Hugh, a gay would-be writer from a posh but moneyless family, and Harmony, a former model and wildly successful hair-stylist worried about turning 40 without a child. Cyn is also still close to her typically eccentric but lovable family, as interminable pages of visits home attest. Despite a full recovery, her mother’s bout with cancer when Cyn and her brother were kids has scarred Cyn by making her too eager to please—as Cyn’s therapy group leader Veronica has told her many times. Then Cyn discovers that her co-worker and main competition for a senior copywriting position, Chelsea Roggenfelder, is out to get her. First, Chelsea, the daughter of an American advertising mogul, maneuvers Cyn into driving a car plastered with advertisements for a hemorrhoid ointment. Then Chelsea steals Cyn’s brilliant idea for a major ad campaign for a new low-fat doughnut. When Chelsea ends up hospitalized after a yoga accident, Cyn finds herself breaking a few rules as she impersonates Chelsea with the doughnut people in order to prove that she, not Chelsea, came up with the campaign. Meanwhile, a handsome new stranger named Joe has joined Cyn’s therapy group, and soon Joe and she are breaking Veronica’s big rule by fraternizing outside of the group. Their romance, complete with surprisingly graphic sex, hits a snag when Cyn discovers Joe joined the therapy group under false pretenses. And her own false pretenses with the doughnut people almost get her into trouble at work.
Tepid sitcom from the prolific Margolis (Apocalipstick, 2003, etc). Not one of her best.Pub Date: April 26, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-33734-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Delta
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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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