The solution to the Stella puzzle is fairly obvious, while other mysteries—such as a plausible motive for the villain—go...
Lackluster sequel to Mitchard’s Oprah-anointed debut.
In The Deep End of the Ocean (1996), kidnapping victim Ben Cappadora returned as a teenager to his parents Beth and Pat, owners of a popular Chicago Italian eatery. Now 25, Ben has married Eliza, adopted Bolivian daughter of Candy, the detective who helped investigate his disappearance. Ben and Eliza have a six-month-old daughter, Stella. Meanwhile, Ben’s ne’er-do-well older brother Vincent, bankrolled by local godfather Charley Seven, has filmed a documentary about the families of other kidnapped and disappeared children entitled No Time to Wave Goodbye. Beth is conflicted about the movie, not just because of the debt to Charley (who’s really a pussycat), but because it reopens old wounds—for example, the fact that Ben still thinks of himself as “Sam,” the name his kidnapper gave him, and is actually closer to the kidnapper’s husband than to his real father. Shortly after Vincent receives an Oscar for No Time to Wave Goodbye, Stella is snatched from her babysitter. Candy and Beth mobilize their forces, but police have no leads. Then a letter appears, penned in pretentious prose complete with Latin legalese, leading Vincent to recall the straitlaced lawyer in his documentary whose favorite daughter vanished at age 17. The book’s most gripping sequences follow, involving wilderness survival in the Northern California mountains. Ample detail based on Mitchard’s own backcountry treks lends verisimilitude as Ben and Vincent search for Stella aided by a seasoned guide and her trusty kidnapper-sniffing St. Bernard. The proliferation of characters may confuse readers, especially those unfamiliar with the earlier book, and a disproportionately large chunk of the narrative is devoted to exposition.
The solution to the Stella puzzle is fairly obvious, while other mysteries—such as a plausible motive for the villain—go unplumbed.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6774-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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