A character study that will draw you in—just don’t expect to have any energy left at the end.
In Zancan’s debut, three Florida girls experience a life-changing night when they discover a movie star at their favorite local haunt.
The Shamrock doesn’t see much excitement. In fact, you can pretty much guarantee how a night there will unfold. Nestled in a nowhere town outside of Orlando, it’s the go-to place for Maggie, Nina, and Lindsey to test-drive their newfound adulthood. As narrator Maggie paints this picture, she notes that, on the surface, “we look happy.” But when A-list movie star Sam Decker arrives in search of a night of drinking away from the spotlight, this illusion of stability begins to unravel. Sam Decker looks happy, too—or should be, based on how he’s portrayed in the magazines the girls adore—but we know outright that this fated night is the last of his life. This revelation should allow for a healthy building of suspense, but the book never achieves the full crescendo the setup suggests. Instead, the story turns inward, focusing on how this encounter with Decker brings out each girl’s insecurities and the ways in which they diverge and connect. Decker takes the sparkle out of movie-star life, revealing himself as flawed and rather lost; if someone like him can feel so small, where does that leave the rest of them? Zancan describes Florida’s oppressive heat so well that it seems to affect the entire narrative; the girls' shared history is revealed in a slow, almost dreamlike fashion. As a narrator, Maggie is distant, weighed down by the responsibility of friendship and years of memories: “We cried about these things alone and together and wrote about them in the journals we had grown too old to call diaries.” There’s a stickiness to the prose that keeps it from achieving its intended impact.
A character study that will draw you in—just don’t expect to have any energy left at the end.Pub Date: June 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59463-364-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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