Brownrigg considers motherhood, romance, identity, and the changes brought by time in this tender, insightful novel.
Two women, former lovers, reconnect with each other and themselves in Brownrigg’s sequel (which can be read independently) to her 2001 novel, Pages for You.
Flannery Jansen is married to a famous artist, living in the Bay Area, and raising (not quite single-handedly) the couple’s young daughter, Willa. When Flannery was in her 20s, before she became the third wife of the mercurial, charismatic Charles Marshall, she wrote two books, one a bestselling erotic memoir about her journey across Mexico with the woman who was then her lover to find her absent “aging American hippie” father. But the chapter of Flannery’s life that left the deepest emotional imprint on her came earlier still, when she was a coltish undergrad at Yale, deeply in love with a graduate student named Anne Arden. Anne taught Flannery about art, literature, and, ultimately, heartbreak. When Flannery’s thoughts keep her up at night, she turns them to the perfect relationship she imagines Anne has with the man for whom she left her, Jasper. But just as motherhood has dramatically altered Flannery’s identity and trajectory, Anne’s decision never to have children has shaped hers. Jasper, having developed a sudden, late-in-life yearning to have kids, has abandoned Anne after two decades together to start a family with someone else—someone young and French. Reunited at a literary conference—“Women Write the World”—at the university where their original love story played out, Flannery and Anne find their ways back to each other. In so doing, each woman also finds her way back to herself. Brownrigg (The Delivery Room, 2008, etc.) approaches her characters with clarity and sensitivity, capturing the nuances in the women’s relationships to the people they love—as mother, daughter, sister, friend, wife, or lover—and the power they give those people to define and inspire them. Though the author’s touch is generally deft, the prose does, at times, get a bit moist. Ultimately, however, the story is propelled less by the thrill of the erotic than by the pull of loves lost and selves seemingly left behind yet always with us.
Brownrigg considers motherhood, romance, identity, and the changes brought by time in this tender, insightful novel.Pub Date: July 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61902-933-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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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