A second novel from Racina (The Great L.A. Blizzard, 1977) offers a busily plotted tale of obsessive love run nastily amok. We first meet gorgeous Matt Hinson in a snowstorm, gearing up to murder a beloved elderly couple as a ploy to win the love of their daughter Julia, inconveniently married to someone else. He accomplishes the deed with relish, disappearing on snowshoes only minutes before Julia arrives to discover the carnage. At the funeral, Matt delivers a sugary eulogy—and turns his calculating green eyes on the object of his desire. Luckily for him, Julia's marriage is in trouble: A recent mastectomy has ruined the couple's sex life, and husband Tom has withdrawn into his work. While Julia and seven-year-old daughter Molly hang around her dead parents' home and cavort in the snow with Matt (Tom's gone back to his San Francisco office), investigators are racking up evidence. Julia and Matt spend a passionate night together; the next day, he's charged with the double murder. Throughout the trial, Julia is his most ardent defender. She gets a volume of his sensitive poetry published, lobbies tirelessly for his release, and separates from her husband. Tom has three weeks of therapy, recognizes his faults and overcomes them, and tries to get his wife back. He reads some computer disks he's swiped from her desk, and learns that Matt unwittingly revealed to Julia his involvement in the murders. Matt, just released from prison, goes to Julia's penthouse to celebrate; she attempts revenge by shoving him off a balcony. But he survives to take her hostage, and heads for Yosemite to kill her, though fortunately the new, improved Tom is in pursuit. Meantime, shallow and unpleasant main characters and clumsy technical effects (Matt's whole trial, for instance, is reported via newspaper clips and TV transcripts) bog things down; the graphic sex is more unpleasant than titillating. Lurid, unbelievable, and thoroughly tedious.
Pub Date: Sept. 11, 1996
ISBN: 0-525-94030-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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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