Bleak settings needn’t be drab—Emily Brontë knew that. But May’s transplanted Scots have given up the gloaming for the...
A Montreal cop reeling from his divorce confronts ancestral tragedy when he’s sent to investigate a murder on a remote island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Sime (pronounced Sheem, and Scots Gaelic for Simon) Mackenzie is called to the stark setting to investigate the murder of a local businessman. No one quite believes the victim’s wife’s claim that she was startled by an intruder and her husband was killed in the struggle. The investigative team, including Sime’s ex, Marie-Ange, appears to be merely marking time until they can formerly charge the newly minted widow. But something in the woman stirs Sime’s memory, though they haven’t met, and the disappearance of a local man makes it harder for this haggard policeman to accept his colleagues’ foregone conclusion. May (The Blackhouse, 2011, etc.) has constructed the book so that the investigation alternates with an account of one of Sime’s ancestors and his forced repatriation from Glasgow to Canada. As in the contemporary sections, the plotting is clunky, much of the writing is expository, and what’s meant to be descriptive too often feels as if the reader has opened the encyclopedia to an entry on Scottish agriculture of the 18th century (“the thatch from the roof, blackened and thick with the sticky residue of peat soot, that we laid on the lazy beds with kelp to feed the potatoes”).
Bleak settings needn’t be drab—Emily Brontë knew that. But May’s transplanted Scots have given up the gloaming for the gloomy.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63265-663-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Mobius
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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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