A smart, entertaining send-up of celebrity under siege.
A rock star searching for his soul embarks on an underworld picaresque in this gonzo satirical romance.
Rook Heisenberg, frontman for the stupefyingly vapid band the Little Bang, experiences every facet of rock-star life—the adoring fans, the glitzy mansion, the three-ways with random bimbos—and a dazed sense of anomie, salved only by memories of his long-lost high-school sweetheart Hula. Once an Internet search and an e-mail reforge that link, Rook is off to Amsterdam, where he discovers that Hula has become the moll of Svidrigailov, a Russian gangster who has put her to work in his brothel, and that Rook and Hula have a teenage daughter named Boudicca, whom Svidrigailov has sequestered in Mumbai. Accompanied by his bodyguard, a beautiful Chinese woman who is as blasé about mass killings as she is about group sex, Rook sets out for India to rescue Boudicca from white slavery. There he is overwhelmed by street urchins, Bollywood stars, menacing thugs who melt when he croons to them, and a pharmaceutical consciousness-raiser so potent that it threatens to destroy his narcissistic cocoon. Rook’s quest gives the author a broad canvas for a funny, sardonic portrait of fame at its most inescapable: as he dispenses autographs and $100 bills to an ever-changing throng of autograph-seekers and flunkies who secretly despise him, he’s constantly confronted with billboards of himself hawking his fashion line. Glavin tells the story with a polished prose style and threads it with intriguing allusions to everything from magic squares to Van Gogh and Dostoevsky. Amid the breezy, Tarantino-esque provocations, he smuggles pathos into Rook’s search for family and meaning, though the debauches and dismemberments proceed in such a casual, jaded tone that they drain some of the novel’s emotional charge. But this diverting, imaginative read keeps the pages turning.
A smart, entertaining send-up of celebrity under siege.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0982546628
Page Count: 498
Publisher: Kevin Glavin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
