A modern comedy of manners that at times tries too hard to entertain.
Second-novelist Coll (karlmarx.com, 2000) energetically chronicles a soccer mom’s bumpy ride to tranquility as she deals with issues of finance, family, and self-esteem.
Our frazzled narrator, Jane Kramer, wife of Leon Kramer of Kramer’s Discount Furniture Store, is one of those women who are smart but fear they’re failing life: Jane is friendless, dislikes her job, money is tight, and her marriage is souring. She works at the family store with Leon and his old uncle Seymour because they can’t afford to pay outsiders—the merchandise is cheap and dated, someone is stealing from the till, and local preservationists are suing them for pulling down an allegedly historic barn when they rebuilt the store. Teenaged son Justin is into Goth music, dresses entirely in black, and has been suspended from school. Jane also suspects that Leon may be having an affair with voluptuous Delia, the furniture saleswoman advising them on how to improve business. Jane has taken to spending her lunch hour in the nearby graveyard on the Rockville Pike—a notorious Washington, DC, strip-mall highway—where F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald are buried. The graves could help business if, Delia suggests, they sell patio furniture with Fitzgerald associations. While Jane rereads the Fitzgerald novels to get ideas, she also becomes involved, through another soccer woman, in Memories Inc., a scrapbook merchandising system run, like Tupperware, out of homes. When Justin heads to New York without telling her, and Leon goes on a so-called business trip with Delia, Jane, in a panic, heads after them and has adventures of her own, including counseling a famous Washington trial lawyer and narrowly missing an encounter with thieves at the Plaza. By the close, though, a serendipitous series of events resolve misunderstandings and improve family fortunes, plus formerly hapless Jane no longer feels unloved and friendless.
A modern comedy of manners that at times tries too hard to entertain.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-4477-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 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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