Christopher Moore does much better work with both vampires and Shakespeare, but this bawdy send-up should slake the thirst...
The Bard struggles with madness and monsters in this risqué literary burlesque from paranormal romanticist Handeland (Apocalypse Happens, 2009, etc.).
As one of his famous creations might note, the William Shakespeare who creeps through this book is well-armed with “[t]houghts black, hands apt, drugs fit, and time agreeing.” Indeed, Hamlet’s inner demons are no match for Will’s as he struggles with vampirism. The novel opens in 1592 in London’s Southwark neighborhood. Shakespeare walks through the shadows, only to get his throat sliced from ear to ear by young Katherine, an amateur chasseur (French for “hunter”) trained by her Haitian nanny to stalk and kill the undead. But Shakespeare is hardier than he seems and soon thrusts himself upon the boy he believes Katherine to be. (Academics across the world just punched the air in triumph.) It turns out that Shakespeare has quite the long history, which leads to some laugh-out-loud moments. Immediately after kissing his newly discovered “Dark Lady,” Will muses, “The last time he’d felt like this about a woman, he’d lost her. First to Caesar, then to Antony, then to an asp.” For the most part, the book is shameless fun, with a decent grounding in the Bard’s work—the denouement echoes Romeo & Juliet—and a crisp, humorous bite. It’s when Handeland indulges her romance background that the novel suffers: “He would lick that skin; he would let the heat of her wash over him, then bask in that heat like a cat in the morning rays of the sun.” Ouch.
Christopher Moore does much better work with both vampires and Shakespeare, but this bawdy send-up should slake the thirst of mash-up lovers a little longer.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-64152-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
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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