Not high art, but it’ll work for the beach or the plane.
A besotted ex-husband; a boss and lover more handsome than Peter Gallagher; and an overworked FedEx carrier: latter-day love, in all its messy glory.
Maddy Green is a 37-year-old successful art director in an Atlanta ad agency. She’s an only child, an Oberlin College grad, a light drinker. She keeps a small menagerie in her apartment, a cozy place befitting Mary Tyler Moore. She’s been bad, though whether that ended her marriage to the apparently wonderful Jack is something she’s not quite sure about. Indeed, Maddy reflects, “The problem was complicated: Our divorce was amicable. There was none of the usual bitterness.” This latest tale from Stevens (Tattoo Girl, 2001, etc.) begins as an airy and frothy confection, but as it proceeds, both Maddy and Jack and those in their immediate orbit find reasons to be bitter, and things get more interesting. For Maddy’s part, it’s the discovery that strapping, hiking-boot–clad Jack, the heroic hippie born ten years too late for the ’60s, is way less than perfect, even though, three years after the divorce, he’s come calling to announce that he’s mended his ways. On Jack’s part, it’s that Maddy left behind a tangible reminder of her own wayward behavior back in the day. What better than a tropical island getaway for sorting out the mess? Though her story sometimes threatens to dissolve into terminal cuteness and is marred by clumsy passages (“I pushed my long straight brown hair behind my ears”), Stevens has a sure take on the foibles of relationships. Arch and funny, she takes her readers on a bumpy ride, punctuated by nicely observed aperçus (“Never underestimate the difficulties of coming home to an empty apartment every night”; “Talking to a best friend, I’ve noticed, is nearly synonymous with complaining”), that closes with easily foreseen but nonetheless crowd-pleasing fireworks.
Not high art, but it’ll work for the beach or the plane.Pub Date: July 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-451-21202-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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