An imaginative and tender novel about assisted suicide.
In Castano’s literary novel, a woman intending to end her life spends a few days in a mostly abandoned shore town.
Wildwood, New Jersey no longer exists…at least, not as it once it did. Destroyed by a hurricane in 2029, it was rebuilt, only to be knocked down for good by a second storm in 2030. When 22-year-old Maya Valencia disembarks at the Wildwood bus terminal in the winter of 2035, she finds something akin to a ghost town: “Only every fourth or fifth streetlamp worked, if barely. No ambient glimmer from front porches or second-floor residences. Boards nailed over most windows. Uncle Bill’s Pancake House, bashed and looted.” She takes a room at the Sea Gull Motel, and the next morning she visits the town’s infamous Elea Clinic, known for its assisted suicide procedures. Maya suffers from multiple sclerosis, and though she hates the thought of leaving her younger sister, Celeste, alone to fend for herself, she knows Celeste will be saddled with her medical bills if she allows the disease to progress. The catch: The law requires the patient to spend four nights in New Jersey before undergoing the procedure. As Maya rides out her final days at the Sea Gull, she encounters a number of people in similar situations, including Glenn Haversham, a middle-aged failed “businessman” with a history of aggrieved partners and cheated clients trailing behind him. Glenn’s looming suicide seems like it might be an act of sheer exhaustion, but he and Maya find common ground. In this ghost town filled with soon-to-be ghosts, the normal routines of life are pulled away just enough to perhaps allow Maya to find something worth living for. Castano’s Wildwood is a truly imaginative netherworld, complete with a Death District where people can settle their affairs. Glenn encounters the former Dollar General, now “‘Parentalia Advisors—Conclusionary Consultants’,” offering “‘Wills-Insurance Advisement-Asset Transfers-Estate Planning-Tax Guidance.’ An all-you-can-eat-buffet of administrative chores.” Short but richly drawn, this is a beautiful rumination on all the things, good and bad, we leave behind.
An imaginative and tender novel about assisted suicide.Pub Date: June 3, 2024
ISBN: 9798988023432
Page Count: 200
Publisher: New Meridian Arts
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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