Moving and honest exploration of sex, sin and redemption.
A gay Atlanta businessman struggles to make peace with his faith and sexuality when his first love unexpectedly reappears.
With a successful greeting-card company, chic apartment and no shortage of handsome male admirers, Chauncey Greer has much to be thankful for. And he shows his gratitude every Sunday by attending services at Abundant Joy, a moderately sized church where he feels accepted, “measured by the love I have in my heart and not the lust I have in my head.” It is during one rousing service that he finds himself haunted by his past, and the singing career he gave up far too soon. As a teenage member of R&B boy band Reunion, Chauncey briefly tasted fame, until his close relationship with bandmate Sweet D tore the group apart. Ready for a comeback, Chauncey is understandably excited when his pastor taps him to sing at a revival headlined by up-and-coming minister and senatorial candidate Bishop Damien Upchurch. His joy turns to dismay when he finds out that the young bishop is none other than Sweet D, all grown up and running on a conservative—and rabidly anti-gay—platform. Chauncey is then torn between outing the hypocritical preacher and keeping his private life private. To add to this stress, Chauncey is menaced by a studly wannabe-be blackmailer and confronted by Damien’s nasty shrew of a wife, Grayson, who wants to make sure that nothing stands in the way of her Election Day plans. Harris’s addictive latest (A Love of My Own, 2003, etc.) manages to capture both the erotic heat and spiritual fervor of Chauncey’s world, as the man is forced to face the choices he has made, and the fact that he has been unable to enjoy a committed relationship since parting with Sweet D. The story ends somewhat quickly with a silly soap opera twist that does little to cloud its inspiring message of spiritual love and inclusion.
Moving and honest exploration of sex, sin and redemption.Pub Date: May 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-51272-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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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