A drier version of Jaws, from the bestselling British novelist (The Horse Whisperer, 1995) whose distinctions so far are of scale rather than content. Hope, Montana, is not exactly the crossroads of a million lives. Barely more than a crossroads itself, it’s a quiet ranching community whose inhabitants are mostly descendants of the original white settlers who moved in a hundred years ago. But a frightening rash of brutal wolf attacks—against both cattle and people—makes Hope the center of more attention than it had ever looked for. Dan Prior, the local rep of the US Wildlife Service, is an Eastern transplant whose long struggle to gain acceptance from the locals is threatened by his role as the enforcer of hated government conservation laws, and his life is suddenly made all the more difficult when the cattlemen (like ranchers Buck Calder and Abe Harding) take it upon themselves to kill the wolves in defiance of the Endangered Species Act. When the hunters are arrested and tried, a media riot puts Hope on the map and brings in its wake environmental crackpots as well as bona fide experts like biologist Helen Ross. Helen is opposed to killing the wolves, but her position is compromised by the adulation of Buck Calder’s teenaged son Luke, who falls in love with her. Luke’s troubled family is haunted by the death of his brother Henry some years earlier; his mother Eleanor responded to the death, and to her husband’s repeated infidelities, by losing her Catholic faith and retreating into depression and despair. Meantime, Helen really just wants to get to the bottom of the wolf slayings, while Buck is looking for trouble and Dan just wants to keep the townsfolk from blowing their lids altogether. Ah, how will it all end? The same sort of sentimental pastiche, written in the same New Age Harlequin prose, that made The Horse Whisperer one of the most inexplicable success stories of the 1990s. (First printing of 650,000; Literary Guild main selection; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 8, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-31700-X
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Dell
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
IN THE NEWS
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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