An enjoyable beach read with a likable heroine.
This third installment of a series maintains the author’s satirical take on modern American suburban life while dealing with some serious societal problems.
The Shady Park characters return, with Nicole Ernst taking the starring role in this volume. Nicole is the seventh grade teacher who was accidentally shot at an open school board meeting convened to overturn its unfortunate decision to switch to fundamentalist textbooks. She also got into serious trouble when she discovered that Chelsea Grosbeck, the daughter of a wealthy real estate developer, had plagiarized her school essay. Now 37-year-old Nicole has been transferred to Northbrook High School, where she is teaching a group of generally disinterested, ill-informed teenagers. It doesn’t take long for her to run afoul of her new boss, Principal Matthew Higgenbottom, who has been dragging his feet authorizing delivery of the nonfundamentalist books ordered by the board. Nicole makes an end run around Higgenbottom, and the volumes suddenly arrive. But more trouble is on the way. Fifteen-year-old student Juan Moreno begins receiving unsolicited naked photographs on his cellphone from an eighth-grade girl, and suddenly Shady Park becomes engulfed in a sexting scandal. When one of these photos is sent to Nicole’s cellphone, she is drawn into a dangerous undercover police operation. Simultaneously, she becomes romantically involved with Ralph Novich, the relationship-shy editor of the Shady Park Ledger, whose wife left him for her Virginia-based true love: her first cousin. Keech’s (Shady Park Panic, 2018, etc.) narrative rests somewhere between Oscar Wilde and Desperate Housewives. From ostentatious McMansions to crooked politicians and religious zealots, little escapes the author’s sharp eye for hypocrisy and amusing excess. Here Keech describes Nicole feeding her cat: She “stopped by to serve Smokey some Cod, Sole, and Shrimp Paté in Florentine Sauce.” There are strange characters aplenty. Chief among them is Andre Smyth, a tenderhearted neurotic who can’t answer a simple question in less than a tangents-filled paragraph. Despite the quirky cast and more than a hint of melodrama, the author uses well-directed sarcasm to highlight some critical, real-world issues: anti-immigration fervor, anti-science mania, and child pornography. In addition, readers should find the story’s conclusion satisfying.
An enjoyable beach read with a likable heroine.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73305-240-5
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Real Nice Books
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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