More California whimsy from the author of When Your Lover Leaves... (1980) and Sightings (1987)—this one detailing the misadventures of young Rome Morrison, a college dropout who dreams of becoming a writer, and the eccentric family she hooks up with. ``I live a life of deceit,'' confesses Rome on page one of this sunny tale, and never afterward does she utter so profound a truth. Having quit college and run away from her wealthy Boston home (her father is a famous chef, her mother a recent suicide), she has moved into her best friend's apartment in San Francisco, assuring her roommate that she has a job (though she doesn't) and planning to write novels until she doesn't win the Nobel Prize, since Daddy says no good writers have ever done so. First, though, she needs rent money, so she lands a job as assistant to Wade DeRosa, a young writer with a flourishing modeling career on the side. Rome takes dictation as Wade dictates his morbid play about a family dinner party in which the bad son, ``Dark,'' pretends to poison his mother, while the good son, ``Light,'' attempts to save her. As Wade's own neurotic mother drops in and out of the house, muttering about finding glass shards in her coffee cup, Rome begins to suspect that the play is autobiographical—particularly since Rome currently is tending to an unidentified coma victim in a hospital who precisely resembles Rome's description of his own missing brother. Lo and behold, the coma victim and Wade's brother, Rusty, are one and the same, and as Rome engages in playful affairs with both brothers (and their mother really does die), she must decide which of them is really Light and which is Dark, and which of the two is most appropriate for a young writer to love. Trott indulges in the very pratfalls, flukes of fate, and general playfulness that most novelists avoid, making this prime cult-audience material—for lighthearted eccentrics only.
Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1992
ISBN: 0-88184-754-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1991
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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