Ten cohesive tales that earn laughs with sincere characters.
A mishmash of oddball and rollicking individuals inhabits a Florida fishing village in this debut short story collection.
Bay Key is an isolated island village on the Gulf Coast. It’s a place for all sorts of people, like Floyd Butler, a drunk who frequents the local M&M Bar. In “The Lottery Ticket,” Floyd is sure he can woo hotel chef Janine if he can just win the Florida lottery. Like many of the book’s characters, Floyd crops up in a number of tales. Even the charming eponymous hero of “Bernard’s Great Adventure,” the Bay Hotel’s director of guest relations (and a basset hound), recurs, as do his hotel-owning caretakers, Todd and Terri Swift. Characters are often shiftless and dabble in alcohol and recreational drugs, including Buddy Palmer and his family in “The Meglodon Curse.” But neither they nor the stories are one-dimensional. In “Jim Anderson’s Ashes,” for example, Jim’s suicide leads to the discovery of his diaries, which enlighten EMT Zeke with details on a fellow Vietnam veteran’s life. This is trailed by “Hemingway’s Best Friend,” in which a storm dredges up nostalgia for Todd—an old videotaped interview from his days as a Miami TV reporter. Curious characters, despite sometimes craving the isolation Bay Key allows, are drawn to one another; loner Ben of “The Blue-Footed Boobies” befriends vacationing elderly couple William and Grace Elliott-Smith thanks to a shared affinity for birds. The collection’s highlight, “Rattlesnake Billy,” epitomizes the tales’ skillful blend of zaniness and sincerity. In it, Billy Joe Kitchens somehow sustains a snake bite from reptilian roadkill. The locals’ swift response is both hilarious (clearing a spot for a helicopter entails arming neighbor Daryl, who once inadvertently shot himself, with a chainsaw) and endearing in everyone’s determination to help. Sanders’ breezy prose makes the book a quick read. In “Up on the Roof,” Terri bemoans the couple’s lack of privacy as hotel owners, with their sex life “more of a memory than a reality.”
Ten cohesive tales that earn laughs with sincere characters.Pub Date: March 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5428-9024-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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