A richly crafted tale of redemption and reinvention that stands out from the crowd.
Canadian sisters clash and cling.
Raised by hippie parents in a small farm town, Peachy and Beth Archer learn about grief at a young age when they discover their mother’s suicide note and lifeless body. Beth, the older sister, uses alcohol, sex and drugs to ease her pain. She flees Canada for the opportunity to reinvent herself as a stylist in New York City, where financial and career success come easy, but her love life is a train wreck and drama a constant companion. Peachy in turn transforms herself into the mother she always wanted, stable and dependable. She marries one of Beth’s castoffs and becomes a stay-at-home mom to two boys. Caretaker of the family homestead, she grows tethered to the farm and lets die her dream of becoming a social worker. Phone calls and Beth’s periodic Canadian sojourns keep the sisters intimate. Peachy serves as Beth’s moral compass while simultaneously envying her escapades. Their relationship crumbles when Beth returns home with the intention of bringing Peachy to New York City for a bit of culture. The night before the trip, Beth takes her wild behavior too far, and this time her sister won’t pick up the pieces. Peachy heads to NYC alone, leaving Beth to clean up her own mess. Humbled, Beth frantically tries to make things right as Peachy revels in her freedom. Gabriele (Tempting Faith DiNapoli, 2002, etc.) is unrivaled at conveying the messy side of motherhood: Peachy writes of “the constant laundry of my life, the sweat socks and skid marks and pee of my boys and men.” She’s a welcome new member to the short list of authors with the power to fully inhabit her characters (think Bobbie Ann Mason or Jane Smiley), leaving the chick-lit purveyors in the dust.
A richly crafted tale of redemption and reinvention that stands out from the crowd.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-5586-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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