The provocative issues raised sometimes get lost in the predictability of the romance and ho-hum characters.
Poet and novelist Matson (A Trick of Nature, 2000, etc.) explores the boundaries between activism and terrorism through the eyes of a privileged college student in the throes of first love.
The pampered, protected daughter of an aristocratic, politely liberal Boston lawyer—a single mother inseminated by a sperm-donor—Julie is a naïve Wellesley College sophomore when she falls madly in love with Neil, a Ph.D. candidate studying deforestation. In her first act of overt rebellion, Julie ignores her mother’s misgivings and accompanies Neil to Oregon for the summer to work with activists who are trying to thwart the logging industry. Of course, unable or unwilling to escape her sense of privilege, Julie does keep her trust-fund account handy. Mainly drawn to Oregon by the possibility of sex in the trees with Neil, Julie soon finds herself among young people who take their idealism very seriously. At first intimidated, then skeptical, Julie is drawn to the romanticism of Neil’s commitment. She remains besotted even as she recognizes that he is an ideologue who sees the necessity of terrorist acts for their shock value. Because she can draw, Julie is sent to the Wainwright Timber Company to sketch the plant’s layout. As a ruse, she applies for a job with the company and ends up working there for a month. While spying and stealing company documents for the activists, she gets to know and like her fellow Wainwright employees, even Mr. Wainwright himself. Her ambivalence and burgeoning skepticism deepen when the usually reserved Neil finally declares his love for her. After a bomb he’s planted at an SUV dealership injures a salesman, Julie finally bales out of the movement and returns to school without Neil. Two years later, when she reads that Wainwright Timber has been bombed, she feels guilt and fear.
The provocative issues raised sometimes get lost in the predictability of the romance and ho-hum characters.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2006
ISBN: 0-393-06046-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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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