A quirky, touching love story that offers insights into autism, religion, and personal tragedy.
In Wolf’s debut novel, an autistic man doesn’t immediately grasp that his new “girlfriend” is a prostitute.
Shawn, 24, is a socially awkward computer programmer for a dating website. One evening, he attends his boss’s “Pimps and Hos” party. There, he meets a young woman named Violet, who agrees to go on a date with him. After they arrive at Shawn’s New York City apartment, where he lives with his recently widowed grandmother Ruth, Violet realizes that he doesn’t know that she’s truly a “ho” who expects to be paid. But because Shawn is rather sweet, Violet lets him wait for her as she goes on so-called “auditions” that evening. Later that week, Shawn’s older brother, Colin, takes him to a singles party; Violet shows up as well, finally responding to Shawn’s persistent texts. She’s annoyed when Colin warns her off, telling her that Shawn is a high-functioning autistic; as a result, she and Shawn start hanging out in earnest. Eventually, and rather reluctantly, she agrees to meet him at church services. Arriving late and on her own, she recalls how her mother didn’t believe her when she told her about her uncle’s sexual abuse and how she forbade her from telling her pastor about it; this trauma led to her leaving home and meeting Anton, the pimp who trapped her into prostitution. Shawn catches her sneaking out of the church and proposes, and they soon get married. But later, when Ruth reveals the results of her background check on Violet, the latter runs off. Will Shawn and Violet find a way to forge a new life together? Wolf, an award-winningfilmmaker, has adapted this first novel from his own original screenplay, and its cinematic potential clearly shows. The high-concept narrative is entertaining, well-paced, and highly visual, as Shawn also grapples with synesthesia, hearing sounds when seeing color. The work’s scope is also rather ambitious, encompassing discussions of Scripture, Shawn’s earlier girlfriend, Violet’s fellow sex workers, and even the dating website’s connection to human trafficking, among other things. Still, the story largely holds together, and it’s a charming, humorous, and hopeful tale.
A quirky, touching love story that offers insights into autism, religion, and personal tragedy.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-27427-9
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Morning Star Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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