A gruesome ordeal unredeemed by wit or much drama.
Defying her powerful father, a husband honors his dying wife’s wish for a wilderness canoe trip, in Christian-fiction author Martin’s secular debut (When Crickets Cry, 2006, etc.).
Doss Michaels, raised poor in a Georgia trailer park, is a starving art student working and living in a cold-water studio in Charleston, S.C. When he rescues supermodel Abbie, daughter of upper-crust Charlestonian Senator Coleman, from a boardwalk thug, she visits Doss’s studio and makes him her personal gentrification project. Abbie and Doss, both 21, marry in a civil ceremony, alienating her father and stepmother. Abbie becomes a successful interior designer, eclipsing her father’s fame, at least among Charleston’s elite. Doss’s decor-friendly paintings also take off. Abbie leads Doss on a grand world tour of museums where he’s exposed to Renaissance work he’d only seen in art books. After ten years of marriage, while visiting New York City, the couple is horrified when a lump in Abbie’s breast is discovered. Four years of “slash, poison and burn” cancer therapy leave Abbie a mutilated, desiccated remnant of her former self, but with her indomitable spirit intact. Sentenced to hospice, she urges Doss to take her down the St. Mary’s River, where Doss once worked as a guide. Equipped with two canoes, one for supplies including a stolen cache of sophisticated opiates, they embark on Abbie’s final to-do list: ride a merry-go-round, sip umbrella drinks on a beach, etc. They narrowly escape ambush by four psychopathic rednecks right out of Deliverance. Further downriver, after Doss and Abbie encounter a friendlier group of classic-rock-loving, beer-swilling biker types, the bad rednecks return to a deserted boathouse where the duo has sought shelter. In a sensationally off-putting scene, the thugs discuss whether to rape Abbie, and Doss, this time, can’t intervene. Considerable longueurs result from much nature gazing on the river, and the least stereotypical character, Bob, a crop-dusting defrocked priest, appears too briefly.
A gruesome ordeal unredeemed by wit or much drama.Pub Date: July 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7679-2698-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
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
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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