Cuts from character to character and one year to another make for a choppy ride.
Middling debut thriller about a group of troubled teenagers and the dark secret that stalks them after they become adults.
What awful deed took place by the shores of Loch Fyne oh-so-many years ago? Walker, a BBC investigative journalist, will remind her readers again and again that something tragic indeed happened on that outing to the Scottish Highlands in the late 1970s. The perpetrators were a group of disturbed teenagers lodged at The Unit, a mental home near Edinburgh. In the chapters set way back when, tensions among the gang are clearly ready to combust. Danny Rintoul is a child rapist. In her manic phases, pyromaniac Lydia Young explodes, threatening to torch the place. Alex Baxendale steps boldly out of the closet and launches an affair with a woman on the staff. Innes Haldane is less troubled, more treatable, and thus, by the time she’s an adult, one of the group’s better-adjusted graduates. But whatever happened in the Highlands claims its due years later, first on Innes, then on all the others. A former member of the group leaves Innes a phone message that goes unanswered. Then the caller turns up dead. Shortly after that, another group member dies, an apparent suicide. And then someone kidnaps yet another former member’s child. The author’s ’70s and present-day plot lines circle each other like jets in a drawn-out holding pattern. Like a good flight attendant, she parses out clues to her passengers and keeps promising that something big is coming. But it’s not enough to prevent riders (or readers) from growing weary. Alternating points of view and characterizations that don’t go beyond basic psychiatric diagnoses keep empathy, and thus suspense, at bay. The ending does deliver: the awful deed was indeed awful.
Cuts from character to character and one year to another make for a choppy ride.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-072609-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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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