An impressive family tale with a strong cast.
In this debut novel, a Colorado medical researcher must deal with a lab mystery, thorny secrets, and a boatload of personal conflicts.
Beth Armstrong, the story’s main character, has a lot on her plate and a lot slipping off it. Beth is a gifted researcher (currently working on a cure for multiple sclerosis) who discovers that some of her valuable mice have inexplicably died. Then there is the matter of files that disappear then reappear. Clearly someone is sabotaging her project and murdering the mice (although it is hard to convince her colleagues of this). At home, she copes with her aunt, the redoubtable Kathleen McPherson, who came to tend Beth’s mother in her final illness and now is in the busy researcher’s care. And there is Beth’s husband, Harold, a charming doofus who can’t stand his job as a CFO, preferring to start messy home renovation projects. Kathleen, a glamorous entertainer in her day (with a colorful history that includes speak-easies and mobsters in Chicago and Detroit), and Harold hit it off. Their Cuba Libre–fueled antics annoy Beth, who interrogates Harold about this alarming development (“So Kathleen’s bewitched you, has she?”). Soon Kathleen and Harold both become amateur sleuths. Early on, Beth’s beloved childhood home burns to the ground, and it sure looks like the fault of Kathleen, the doddering chain smoker, which further strains things. (To Beth’s amazement, her aunt firmly denies responsibility.) Eventually, the search for the lab saboteur and thief produces some extremely tense moments. The author can be forgiven a few loose ends—but most things are wrapped up nicely. And there is one real stunner at the conclusion. Dietz is a talented writer, delivering nuggets like “Beth dug a pleasant look out from somewhere,” and “She tossed her imagination in the wastebasket along with the card.” Readers will initially settle in for a standard mystery (who killed the mice?). But when the appealing Kathleen and Harold take over things, this story becomes much more complicated than a simple whodunit—it delightfully turns into serious literature. Readers should hope for more captivating novels from this promising author.
An impressive family tale with a strong cast.Pub Date: June 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-945212-50-5
Page Count: 275
Publisher: Quill Mark Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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