Lively, pitch-perfect and assured. Readers will be wanting to hear more from this writer.
Personal tragedy meets the tragedy of our time in Roe’s winning debut novel.
A girl falls down a well, captures national attention and is saved. A boy survives a tsunami. What happens to such people? Roe builds to a mournful answer: They make lists. They live, and then, like but not like the rest of us, they die. In the case of young Anabelle Vincent, death was part of the bargain from the moment she slipped into a coma—and into the international spotlight. Just as every unhappy family is different in its unhappiness, per Tolstoy, so Anabelle’s is always on the verge of implosion: “You leave a family once,” writes Roe, wisely. “But then you leave them every day after that, too.” Mom, who’s “always felt an allegiance to the place where she’s from, even if there isn’t much there,” may share Dad’s desperation, but there’s nothing like a crisis to bring people together. And as for Anabelle, well, she’s always been an enigma, and now, unconscious, even more so. What’s happening behind those closed eyes? The world conjectures, and waits, the event of Anabelle’s slipping into a different reality providing the excuse for all kinds of questers—women whose daughters are lying ill with cancer, fathers with children fighting overseas—and for all kinds of cads and quacks. Roe’s story, with its careful unfolding, looks behind the psychology of the “victim soul” to examine why it is that needful people crave miracles in the first place; it’s an old question, and writers as diverse as Chaucer and Flannery O’Connor have had their go at it, putting him in good company. But though an old question, Roe’s story feels just right for our desperate and despairing time, when a miracle—any miracle—will do, and when Anabelle may have been better off, after all, not to know what was going on on this side of the curtain.
Lively, pitch-perfect and assured. Readers will be wanting to hear more from this writer.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61620-360-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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
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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