A dreamy, heavily stylized retelling of a very old story.
In Sapienza’s folkloric debut novel, an orphaned teenager raised by a priest is confronted by the reappearance of her Russian mother.
Fifteen-year-old Elena resides in the attic of the onion-domed Our Lady of Sorrows church in San Francisco, where her mother left her as a baby (for reasons unknown to Elena) to be raised by a kindly priest known as Father Al. Instead of attending public school, Elena receives tutoring six days a week from Baba Vera, an old, witchlike woman whose pedagogy takes the form of unending housework. “You are special,” Father Al told Elena long ago when she asked why she didn’t go to school with other kids in the neighborhood, adding, “You are meant to study with Baba until she fulfills her plan.” Elena’s only friends are her childhood doll, Kukla, and the beautiful Vasilisa, the girl’s imaginary companion. Then two new people unexpectedly enter her life. One is Anya Prokioff, a Russian woman who arrives in town and claims to be Elena’s mother, though Father Al seems suspicious. The other is Frank Hudson, a friendly young taxicab driver who worries for Elena’s safety. Over the course of this novel, Sapienza’s prose has a fablelike quality; sometimes it relates gauzy scenes, and other times it tells bloody tales, as when Elena butchers a duck for Baba Vera: “She easily removes the gizzards, heart, and liver. Baba loves these parts too. Maybe they will go into a stew, but Baba has also been known to eat them raw. Elena thinks of what Baba said yesterday: ‘To cook, you must kill.’ ” Although the work is ostensibly set in the modern day, Sapienza does little to update the well-known Russian folktale at its heart. No one talks or acts in a manner that modern readers will recognize; indeed, it could easily have been set in medieval Russia with few changes. Fans of fairy tales may enjoy this offbeat retelling, but those expecting a contemporary novel may find themselves befuddled.
A dreamy, heavily stylized retelling of a very old story.Pub Date: July 25, 2023
ISBN: 9781647425036
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2023
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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