An exciting read that shines a light on the secret layers that can exist between two people who think they know each other.
This riveting mystery unlocks the secrets of a husband and father’s supposed suicide.
Stone’s debut novel takes readers down South, where a broken family tries to make peace with their recent loss. Sally Mason and her troubled 13-year-old son, Colton, have been reeling since Sally’s husband, Jack, died. The coroner declares Jack’s death a suicide, creating a sharper, more personal pain. Sally becomes determined to find the truth behind her husband's mysterious death, hoping that a changed verdict will ease her son’s mind and put a stop to his acting out. She begins with Jack’s appointment book and is surprised to discover little secrets hidden there, such as several references to Sally’s father, whom she hasn’t spoken to in 15 years. Her curiosity piqued, Sally enlists the help of her father-in-law but is met with his fury and a fiery insistence that she leave things alone. Determined to see what secrets Jack kept hidden from her but seemed to share with others, Sally looks into the meetings Jack jotted down involving her father, centered, she suspects, on a covert business deal. Sally is reluctant to be back in contact with her estranged father, but soon the clues point to an underhanded scheme set up among him, Jack and Jack’s father and involving a property acquisition that should have belonged to Jack. As Sally unearths tales of staggering debts, familial betrayal and lies, she discovers what the cost of truth and how deeply her mother’s love runs. With candor, sensitivity and suspense, this novel weaves together elements of mystery and emotion. Sally’s quest and determination to help her son serve as the catalysts for a host of exciting events. Her dynamic character and the many people she encounters while piecing together her husband’s death—and life—prove to be memorable and well-sketched.
An exciting read that shines a light on the secret layers that can exist between two people who think they know each other.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1938749025
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Violet Crown Publishers
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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