A potentially interesting story sabotaged by lack of discipline.
Mexican-American brothers struggle against prejudice and adversity in this first novel from poet/memoirist Baca (The Importance of a Piece of Paper, 2004, etc.).
After their father Casimiro is felled by stroke in 2003, Lorenzo takes over the land Casimiro worked for its owner, Miller. Younger brother Vito, forced to leave the farm after beating up Miller’s son for disparaging a Mexican woman, dons boxing gloves and becomes a championship fighter. Unbeknownst to Miller, Lorenzo grows more than chili peppers; his marijuana crop generates plenty of surplus cash, which he uses to improve conditions for the area’s immigrant field workers. He falls for Carmen, a graduate student writing her thesis on the migrants, but is caught between the way of life made possible by his illicit trade and Carmen’s insistence that they join with the workers to agitate for improved conditions. Meanwhile, Vito becomes a hero to the Chicano field hands by equating his fights with the struggle against Anglo injustice and oppression. The narrative skips back and forth in chronology, always circling around the murder of their mother Nopal when Lorenzo was five. We learn that 15-year-old Nopal fled Mexico for America in 1983, fought off a rapist, was rescued by Casimiro, had a singing career that led to her death; ethereal italicized passages suggest that her spirit still follows her sons. All lines eventually converge in a questionably executed and predictable dénouement that would work better with fuller character development. Baca’s impulse to poetic reverie sacrifices clarity and accessibility for surreal, excessive description. Conversely, lack of specificity keeps the material about the plight of immigrant workers at the level of vague archetypes. The betrayal of one brother by the other, the fight in which their bid for land ownership is at stake, as well as the unlikely discovery of their mother’s murderer are all rushed through in prose that never earns believability, empathy or a hold on the reader’s attention.
A potentially interesting story sabotaged by lack of discipline.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1922-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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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