Check it out for the charming illustrations.
In a fable about an archery guru, Coelho returns to his New Age niche.
This is a loose agglomeration of half-baked philosophical principals masquerading as a novel. The plot is thin: At an indeterminate time in a place vaguely resembling Japan, a stranger comes to the village where Tetsuya, a former master archer, has chosen an anonymous existence as a carpenter. This is the classic sensei-apprentice scenario, the Karate Kid with everything removed but the aphorisms. The stranger has flushed out Tetsuya, with the mixed motives of wanting to show off his own bow-and-arrow chops and ask for pointers. Tetsuya puts the stranger’s skills to the test. The stranger, the archer, and a local boy who will become his apprentice head for a rickety bridge suspended across a chasm. From this precarious perch, swaying in the wind, Tetsuya fires off a perfect hit—piercing a peach at 20 meters. But the stranger is rattled by the danger and misses. Thereby hangs a rather obvious lesson—it’s important to train for difficult as well as optimal circumstances. Spoiler alert: This is the book’s last action sequence, and it’s only the prologue. The novel proper takes the form of Tetsuya’s lectures to the boy as they return to the village. The “way of the bow” so imparted can be summed up as: We are what we continually do; find your tribe; preparation is everything; breathe; maintain elegant posture; be here now. Such tenets, of course, serve any number of disciplines. The ultimate takeaway is confusing—the thing you are best at may not be the thing you love, and you should always embrace the latter as your ultimate calling, as Tetsuya has chosen carpentry. Imagery by Niemann, the compact format, and plenty of white space make this look like an ideal gift book, but the platitudinous text is an afterthought.
Check it out for the charming illustrations.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-31827-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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