by William H. Coles ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 30, 2015
An exhilarating family tale when concentrating on the main characters, but the relationship fireworks and intrigue feel...
A coming-of-age story reveals a smart and strong-willed teen becoming a man in a new and unfamiliar environment.
At the beginning of this novel, Darwin Hastings is on a flight to New York from Pittsburgh to live with his football star cousin Luther Pinnelli. Darwin’s parents died years before, and his aunt can no longer take care of him. He’s ambitious and wants to study medicine after graduating from private school. His plans get muddled when he moves in with Luther, a self-serving celebrity who thinks he’s doing right by Darwin by denying him basic luxuries, making him live in a storage room on his estate, and denying him easy access to the money his parents left him. Darwin is able to overcome just about every obstacle with his keen intellect and genuine empathy for people. It gives him allies in the house, including Luther’s eccentric grandmother, house manager Mrs. Thomas, head of security Laszlo Forgash, and Luther’s girlfriend, Sweeney Pale. He meets Dr. Adrian Malverne on the plane and befriends his family, including two daughters, Helen and Coral. Darwin’s life in New York does not lack for adventure. Laszlo becomes a father figure, teaching Darwin how to drive and other basic life skills. Granny and Mrs. Thomas look out for him when Luther is neglectful. Luther is a philanderer with a gambling problem, which puts him in physical danger at one point during the story. Darwin must navigate all of this, including his friendship with Sweeney, while avoiding his cousin’s problems, getting into medical school, and figuring out his romantic life. Coles (Sister Carrie, 2016, etc.) offers an engrossing story in the first half that shows Darwin finding his place in a world that was set to reject him from the start. There is a strong dynamic between him and the other characters in the house, especially as Darwin’s integrity keeps him—and sometimes everyone around him—in line. That fades severely in the second part when the tale focuses more on Darwin’s relationships with women and a twist involving a murder mystery. Established storylines are unfortunately ignored. The most engaging element is watching these core players bounce off one another, and they do much less of that in the second half.
An exhilarating family tale when concentrating on the main characters, but the relationship fireworks and intrigue feel ordinary.Pub Date: April 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9961903-1-2
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Story in Literary Fiction
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993
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
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by Paulo Coelho ; illustrated by Christoph Niemann ; translated by Margaret Jull Costa
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by Paulo Coelho ; translated by Eric M.B. Becker
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by Paulo Coelho ; translated by Zoë Perry
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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