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AROUND AGAIN

Bleached of genuine drama or human interest, an excellent driving-in-the-car-while-looking-for-parking-place-near-the-beach...

Shea’s lackluster fourth (Lily of the Valley, 1999, etc.) follows a woman’s recollection of a formative summer on a pony farm—when her best friend kidnapped a baby and stole her boyfriend.

With bland prose that expends itself in quantities far more impressive than the simple points it tries to make, Shea introduces 40-ish Robyn Panek as she returns to her Uncle Pal’s horse farm in Massachusetts to sell the old place. Uncle Pal, widowed for some years, has recently fallen ill and is intent on getting rid of it. Shea stirs memories as Robyn recalls the girlhood summer she spent on the farm, when the overbearingly named Lucy Dragon, a distant relative, showed up for a visit in the aftermath of a suicide attempt. Robyn asserts that this had been shocking for her, but Shea never really gives the reader a feel for it, aside from some stale “I remember I went to a mental institution once and it was scary” anecdotes from Lucy. Robyn had also been in love with goodhearted Frankie, the delivery boy from the local dairy, and shortly after Lucy arrived, she began flirting with him. Lucy then snatched a nearby baby and hid out with Frankie for a few days, until the three of them were caught. Robyn fled, but two decades later, Lucy herself, now an established realtor, shows up to help sell the farm. She’s in a giving-something-back sort of mood and confides to Robyn that she’d been pregnant, had been forced to give the child up for adoption, and was feeling some baby-yearning that summer. Frankie shows up, too, tells Robyn the dark secret of hiding with Lucy, and owns up to the fact that he’s still in love with Robyn. They get together, but one morning both the prized horses and Lucy go missing. Mad reenactment of a past horror? Not to worry: Lucy’s been swinging a sweet deal that leaves everyone happy.

Bleached of genuine drama or human interest, an excellent driving-in-the-car-while-looking-for-parking-place-near-the-beach read.

Pub Date: July 10, 2001

ISBN: 0-7434-0375-4

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Pocket

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001

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THE ALCHEMIST

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

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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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