Rice (Crazy Loco, 2003, etc.) pulls stories from his native ground, that fertile bicultural soil along the Rio Grande where the great border river makes its way to the sea.
The book includes nine pieces of original “sudden fiction,” often no longer than two pages, all of which are told in the first person. As with some of the previously published pieces, many seem autobiographical, and all explore the life of a child in the vibrant Mexican American culture of south Texas. Rice has a fondness for a sharp turn at a story’s end, not an O. Henry ending, but delightful all the same. The sudden fiction includes “Man vs. Beast,” wherein two little brothers are stung while maliciously killing a jellyfish, and “Dad Shoots to Kill,” about a boy who worries about his National Guard father, sent to watch for looters prowling the hurricane-ravaged streets of Brownsville. The longer works come from Rice’s collection Give the Pig a Chance and his contributions to anthologies. The author makes death a character in more than one of the pieces, and there are BB guns, mythical beasts, curses and even teenage experiences in hospitals that inspire medical careers. The most emotionally affecting may be “Tina La Tinaca,” in which a lonely, unattractive single woman becomes guardian to Hector, the son of her drunken brother. A day at Astroworld and a Major League baseball game—“The best time I ever had in my whole life”—ends in tragedy. Throughout, Rice displays a gift for descriptive turns of phrase—e.g.,“[Mother] shook her now-angry dishrag.” The book concludes with the script of a play authored by Mike Garcia based on a Rice short story, “She Flies.” That play, with its theme of opportunities lost and taken by young Hispanic women, has been performed in front of audiences across the nation.
An intriguing variety of stories about growing up Mexican American.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-931010-79-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Bilingual Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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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