A transporting and satisfying read that offers a fanciful twist on its genre.
A woman must learn to fall in love again after returning to her own time in Fosdick’s (The Accidental Wife, 2015, etc.) time-travel romance sequel.
Jessica Brewster thought she was done with traveling through time. Almost three years ago, this modern woman spent four months roughing it in 1886 after magically replacing her look-alike great-great-grandmother Jessamine. As she tried to fit in and keep her real identity secret, she fell in love with Jessamine’s husband, Mitch, and over that summer, she learned “what it meant to love, really love in a heart-thumping, tear-jerking way that would shred priorities.” Now returned to the present day, and separated from the man she loves by more than a century, she lives in a remote Wyoming cabin, raising the person she brought back with her: their son, Scout. But then food and other small items start disappearing from her home. When Jess accidentally shoots the thief responsible, wounding him in a way that results in amnesia, she notices that the man looks just like Mitch. Could he have found a way to reunite with them, even through time? Fosdick cleverly reverses the roles in this sequel as she continues Jess’ romantic tale. At first, Jess and the wounded man struggle with the fact that they’re effectively strangers to each other. But as their love blossoms and fragments of memories return, she starts to feel that something’s off. As Jess tries to dig up the truth about what happened to Mitch, the book grounds readers in wonderfully detailed, fully researched history. The book’s second part transports readers into a related story, set in Meirliún Manor in Ireland, involving the forbidden love between a servant and the daughter of the family he serves. Some parts of the story drag a bit, and readers of the first book may question some of Jess’ decisions in this one. However, Fosdick adroitly resolves her situation and thematically ties the various plotlines together to deliver a satisfying conclusion.
A transporting and satisfying read that offers a fanciful twist on its genre.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5092-1241-5
Page Count: 388
Publisher: The Wild Rose Press, Inc.
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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