No surprises, but a pleasant read.
In the Bridget Jones tradition, young singles in London conquer self-esteem problems before finding true love: a witty if predictable fourth novel from Keyes (Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married, 1999 etc.).
Katherine, Tara, and Fintan moved to London together from their small Irish hometown and have remained best friends into their early ’30s, even though they seem to have little in common. Overly self-controlled Katherine comes across as an Ice Queen. In fact, that’s her less-than-flattering nickname at the advertising firm where she is an accountant. When a fellow worker gently flirts with her, Katherine is so afraid of her own feelings that she accuses him of sexual harassment. Tara is Katherine’s opposite: desperate for affection, she clings to her boyfriend Thomas despite his consistently rude and unpleasant behavior. Softhearted Tara also eats compulsively. (Keyes perfectly captures the overweight overeater’s mindset.) Only Fintan, who is gay and in the fashion industry, natch, has found happiness and true love with Sandro, “the Italian Pony” (he’s too small to be a stallion). Then Fintan becomes seriously ill. It’s not AIDS, but with a cancer that requires intensive chemotherapy. Fintan’s mother and brothers arrive from Ireland and stay in Katherine’s apartment, disrupting her perfect order, while Thomas refuses even to accompany Tara to the hospital. Possibly near death’s door, Fintan exacts promises from his friends to bring some happiness into their lives. He wants Tara to dump the awful Thomas and Katherine to take a chance with her office suitor, the charming and genuinely nice Joe Roth. Meanwhile, their very sophisticated Swedish friend Liv falls madly in love with Fintan’s very unsophisticated older brother Milo, a farmer who has never seen an escalator until now. Will Tara leave Thomas and get back to a size eight? Will Katherine cheat herself out of her big chance for romantic happiness? Will Fintan recover? Will Milo move back to the farm?
No surprises, but a pleasant read.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-688-18072-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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