Likable, lightweight and meant to appeal to the very people Galant is semi-satirizing.
In her second genial lampoon of New Jersey life, Galant (Rattled, 2006) takes aim at new-age suburbanites and the national obsession with climate change, among other targets.
The same day that Nina’s newly opened yoga studio floods, her husband Michael’s job as a meteorologist at Newark Airport is outsourced to the Philippines. Nina, a yoga teacher on anti-depressants, turns to feng shui to rid home and business of bad spirits. Soon one disaster follows another. Michael comes under Homeland Security surveillance for studying cloud formations in the Newark Airport parking lot. Nina’s attempt to hide Michael’s job loss from her judgmental mother Belle falters when Belle decides that she and Nina’s father Max should visit to avoid a Florida hurricane. Flying north separately due to a lack of seat availability, Max loses his luggage and his identification, then is mistaken for a crazy homeless person. While at Newark to bring Max home, Michael comes back under Homeland Security radar. Taken into custody at gunpoint, he is interrogated and held in isolation. Meanwhile, Michael and Nina’s son Adam, an eighth grader, attends Lisa Epstein’s outsized bat mitzvah and decides that he wants a bar mitzvah of his own. After all, he’s half Jewish, even if he is being raised as a Unitarian, part of Nina’s attempt to escape her Jewish Princess past. Enticed by Lisa, Adam commits a naughty prank against a teacher and is reprimanded. Shaken, he meets with a Hasidic rabbi who invites Adam and his family to Shabbat dinner. With Michael missing and her business floundering, Nina loses it at the rabbi’s house and says “the F-word.” And the hurricane has followed Nina’s parents north. Although Galant pulls some of her punches and her characters slide toward stereotypes, this family’s troubles escalate in an oddly believable fashion.
Likable, lightweight and meant to appeal to the very people Galant is semi-satirizing.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36725-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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