Sayers (Who Do You Love, 1991, etc.) once again heads back to Due East, the South Carolina coastal town that's ``generally ugly, same as any small town in America.'' For some it's important to get out of town in youth, and here's the story of what happens—or doesn't—when you do. Sayers follows the ragged fortunes of a Due East ``bad'' girl turned Brooklyn wife and mother of four—and of two needy men. Tiny temptress Franny, of Catholic family and given to sensuous seductions of her teen peers, warms ``rat-faced,'' tow- headed Steward's Protestant teenage bones, but the two will never have real sex. Steward, cut to the quick by Franny's faithlessness, leaves for monastery school; Franny, with a painterly talent, is off to a Jesuit college. There, amid clouds of grass and beer, she meets and marries writer Michael Burke—from poor Irish Brooklyn (martyred mother, slaving sisters, loser brothers, an IRA- affiliated grandfather). The honeymoon is in Ireland—where Sayers inserts writer Michael's script for an Irish warrior-hero saga: he has Franny blown up in his weepy close. But the real years—and pretense—accumulate back in Brooklyn's mean streets, and, of course, there are children. But when can Franny paint? Being good is ``hard.'' Enter Steward, modestly successful in producing videos and documentaries, still obsessed with Franny. Finally, Franny is running back to Due East, where, sunburnt and drunk, she's invaded first by Steward, then by Michael—odd transmitters of jangled inheritances of blood and history. ``They never told the truth, not unless they were writing or painting.... They might have been children, the three of them with their whole lives ahead.'' In her celebration of unlovely, unexamined lives, Sayers draws forth a good deal of sympathy for ``a trio of middle-aged failures running to fat and disappointment'' whose race to nowhere is full of memorable voices, color, and the tang of living.
Pub Date: Feb. 4, 1994
ISBN: 0-385-42425-6
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
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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