An observant familial portrait bogged down by extraneous detail and a frustratingly circuitous plot.
A deep dive into the dysfunction of an extended family.
In her first novel, de Andrade (Memories of Lili, 2014) follows the travails of Michelle, a Montréal woman whose contented life begins to disintegrate when her brother, Joe—who lives across the street from Michelle’s nuclear family—hires a young nanny to help care for his children. Before long, the nanny, Ermelita, nicknamed “Lita,” stirs up conflict in his fraught marriage and attempts to turn his children against their mother. Despite Michelle’s efforts to keep the peace, Lita’s manipulative power plays and Joe’s callous indifference result in complex turmoil involving Michelle’s extended family. What follows is a crushing litany of decadeslong strife, which de Andrade spares no detail in describing. Readers experience every ordeal, from recurring fights over the logistics of celebrations (“The following Saturday, Claudia would be with her mother, so Lita chose Friday for Michelle to prepare the combined birthday dinner”) to the minutiae of Joe’s custody battles. Michelle also unearths long-buried memories of her childhood with Joe, and her struggles to process these traumas in light of the family’s ongoing discord provide the story’s most compelling conflicts. Although it goes against her tendency to accommodate others’ wishes, Michelle slowly comes to view Joe’s family as the “little sect” of the book’s title: a brainwashed cult built around Lita’s dangerous desire for control. The author’s devotion to documenting every facet of the family’s life makes for an odd reading experience; many of their troubles are repetitive and seem to serve little narrative purpose. Such a lack of progress may mirror the frustrations of real-life families, but it also prevents the story from developing much momentum. The author’s reliance on detached description over action or dialogue further robs Michelle’s story of tension. In particular, she paints the characters’ emotions and motivations in broad strokes that keep them from coming fully alive: “Joe’s provocative ways always led to an altercation with Mother and ended in a heated dispute.” Still, Michelle’s story remains a striking reflection of the dark side of family dynamics—hardly entertaining but vivid nonetheless.
An observant familial portrait bogged down by extraneous detail and a frustratingly circuitous plot.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4602-7563-4
Page Count: 276
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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