A touching, well-written book that deftly handles several difficult issues.
Ferrendelli (Dead Wrong, 2015) offers a compelling novel about a lawyer who grapples with a trauma from her past while skillfully representing disabled clients.
Jaime Monroe is a plucky young lawyer working in the Denver district attorney’s office. At the start of the book, she makes a splash by successfully convicting a man who’d raped and murdered his girlfriend’s disabled 15-year-old daughter. After this landmark victory, Jaime is asked to handle a case for another disabled client—24-year-old Ashleigh Roberts, whose mother, prominent journalist Leigh Roberts, wants to have her sterilized to avoid the risk of an accidental pregnancy. Despite her mental disability, Ashleigh is relatively high-functioning with a “sixth grade” intellectual capacity and an IQ of 75, and she doesn’t want her mother to have control over her reproductive decisions. Jaime resigns from the DA’s office and begins practicing privately in order to handle Ashleigh’s case, and while preparing for the hearing, she becomes enmeshed in the worlds of the Roberts family and Ashleigh’s group home, Morningside Heights. Jaime begins to feel tenderly toward Ashleigh, as if she were her little sister, and feels passionately about advocating for her. However, although she enjoys the time she spends with her client, it also evokes painful memories for her, as her own little sister, Sarah, died in a car accident years before. Jaime must learn to cope with her grief and guilt while successfully handling a difficult case. Ferrendelli’s novel examines a unique issue: the reproductive rights of disabled people, which, as one character explains, “are, to put it mildly, riddled with social and ethical questions, controversial as they are complex.” She also creates a very likable main character in Jaime, who’s kind, compassionate, and always works with an “ardent passion.” Despite its focus on several heavy subjects, such as rape, disability, and adultery, Ferrendelli’s book is a heartwarming story that reveals the humanity in all of its characters.
A touching, well-written book that deftly handles several difficult issues.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5186-1508-5
Page Count: 364
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2015
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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