Power's potent debut is less a novel than a multilayered portrait of a North Dakota Sioux community. Interlocking stories mostly recede chronologically and bring to life not just individual characters but also their links to one another in the past and the present. In 1977 Jeanette McVay is shown teaching eighth-grade social studies to her Native American students. In a later section, her 1961 arrival is depicted through the eyes of the powerful Anna Thunder, who sprinkles reservation dirt in Jeanette's shoes, making it impossible for the well-meaning graduate student to leave. Anna figures in many of these stories. When her daughter Crystal becomes pregnant by a Swedish-American named Martin Lundstrom and marries him, Anna steals their daughter at birth, and Crystal tells Martin that the baby is dead. After her ghost is mentioned, a woman named Red Dress arrives to explain what happened to her in 1864 that keeps her from resting peacefully, and later she visits Crystal Thunder's daughter Charlene after Charlene uses her grandmother's ``bad medicine'' to attract men and reaps terrible results. Red Dress also describes the 19th-century attempts of Father La Frambois to convert reservation dwellers. After she translates the priest's bible stories for her father he asks, ``Why are his people so determined to kill their relatives?'' This too reverberates later, when some Indian characters are shown attending parochial school. Despite the fact that many of these stories deal in the supernatural and that they intersect almost constantly, there is never a feeling that Power is forcing her hand, and although the nonchronological arrangement takes away some clarity, in return it graces the book with numerous small and large surprises and moments of recognition. Startling and complex, but always in the most natural way. (First serial to the Paris Review, VLS, and the Atlantic Monthly; Book-of-the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club selections; author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 3, 1994
ISBN: 0-399-13911-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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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