An excellent book about desperate people carefully depicted in minute detail.
Larum’s West Texas–based debut novel offers interconnected tales of murder and mayhem.
Indian Springs is a place of cattle ranches and oil rigs. It’s the current home of this novel’s large cast of characters, including Evan Blaine, a talented reporter whom guilt and regret follow like a weather front; brothers Dink and Del Downs, the former an innocent and the latter a career criminal; Omero Valdez, a psychopath whom one character calls “a sly one, like a coyote”; and naïve, young Tony Angione, who’s just passing through while hitchhiking from New Jersey to California. The law is represented by Sheriff Leo Blunt and, the next county over, Sheriff Brent Fulton and their underlings; some of them are truly bad to the bone, such as Chief Deputy Matt Ridgeway. The fates of all these luckless people eventually converge: Valdez kills a motel clerk in a $460 robbery, poor Tony gets picked up by the wrong people, and fugitive Del is caught while on the run. A later jailbreak and a hunt across multiple counties for the escapees will keep readers riveted to the end. Larum had a career as a newspaper editor in the West, and it shows; it’s clear that he knows what the particular emptiness of the region feels like—and he makes readers feel it, too. Each chapter focuses on a particular character; most are short but some not, as when Blaine’s past is explored or when Ridgeway and Deputy Jess Bruce track down the hapless Joe Dornick through mesquite on horseback or when Tony and Dink try to extricate themselves from untenable situations. The denouement is very cleverly handled, and it’s no spoiler to say that at least one major character winds up truly happy.
An excellent book about desperate people carefully depicted in minute detail.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9966865-0-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Walking Three Bar T Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 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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