Spare prose, startling images and an emotional landscape as harsh as the setting.
A bleak coming-of-age debut set in 1940s New South Wales.
Narrator Day, the son of a Viennese Jewish soprano and a rough monosyllabic Scotsman, is 12 when he witnesses his father, Darwin, tying and gagging his mother in bed each night. His mother had been in declining mental health for several years, since a miscarriage and her discovery that her husband was having an affair with Lelonie, a woman who lives and works on their ranch. Then one night, Day sees his father bury his mother in the red sand on the rise by the billabong. She has suffocated. Day runs away, first to the mud brick hut of Leonie, who takes him in overnight (hiding under her bed when his father appears, he finds himself the unwilling witness to their lovemaking). Then he heads to Melbourne, gets a job working with horses and dreams of being a jockey. At 18, he is shipped to a horse farm in Maryland, along with a racehorse named Unusual. He works hard, meets a girl by the name Callie, who also wants to be a jockey, and is drawn into a nocturnal game in which Callie, her groom and he take bets and run races for money. Day is haunted by memories of his mother and of Dickie, the man she seemed attracted to (and who may be his father). Meanwhile, Callie takes off, and Day finds her only six months later, but it seems she’s with another man. He moves to L.A., trains horses, then heads back to Australia, confronts his father and learns some family secrets. Callie sends for him to ride in a race in Mexico, and together they track down Dickie in Santa Barbara. This odd threesome heads down to Australia when Darwin has a stroke. With all the players in one place, Day learns how far he can trust Callie, Dickie and Darwin.
Spare prose, startling images and an emotional landscape as harsh as the setting.Pub Date: May 10, 2005
ISBN: 1-59692-116-1
Page Count: 258
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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