This odd, dark and often creepy tale of a dysfunctional community and a family that fits right in will keep readers...
Roy’s suspenseful debut novel presents readers with a rich mix of troubled characters planted against the backdrop of a small Kansas farming town and the mysterious deaths of two young girls.
In the turbulent 1960s, Arthur and Celia Scott leave rioting Detroit behind with their three children and move back to Arthur's childhood home in Kansas. His mother, Reesa, and sister, Ruth, still live there, but things have not been going well with Ruth, long married to the drunken bully who once loved their sister, Eve. The fragile blonde Eve died violently many years ago, her body found in the shed on the Scott property. The community’s consensus is that Ray murdered Eve; whether or not the charge is true, her death certainly turned his life to ruins. Soon the family settles in: Arthur and Celia’s oldest daughter meets and falls for a local boy, while young Daniel, their son, struggles to become a man in a town where he has no friends and a father who doesn’t believe in him. Meanwhile, the youngest child, Eve-ee, who like her namesake aunt is both small and fair, finds kinship with her long-dead relative, who left behind a closet of beautiful dresses and a sad statue of the Virgin Mary. When another local girl, also blonde, petite and Eve-ee’s age, disappears and is feared murdered, the Scotts reexamine the circumstances surrounding Eve’s death. Soon Ruth finds herself once again on the receiving end of one of Ray’s beatings, but this time she has Arthur to shield her. Eventually, the Scott family realizes the truth about what happened to Eve, and Ruth deals with the frightening future she faces if she stays with her husband. Roy, a former tax accountant, writes sparingly of the bleakness of life and death on a farm. In her hands, the plot twists and turns, but, in the end, all the pieces fit, although the denouement is unsettling.
This odd, dark and often creepy tale of a dysfunctional community and a family that fits right in will keep readers wondering right until the last page.Pub Date: March 31, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-525-95183-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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
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