Emily's reason enough to look twice at this sensitive, simmering little gem of a debut.
A young girl shocked into silence by her twin's death traces the summer of 1974, as her family races toward deepening crisis.
At a distant glance, Donald Stone’s family might seem like material for an update of Cheaper by the Dozen. The inventor and his uncomplaining wife live with a houseful of children—John, Hope, Sarah, Elizabeth Ruth, Emily, Luke, and baby Owen—in little Cawood, Massachusetts, and vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, where everybody knows everything about everybody else. One of the things everybody knows about the Stones, however, is that their crowded house has seemed empty since their daughter Emily’s twin brother Ham, 11, drowned during their last trip to the Vineyard, and that the family’s never been the same since. Emily has refused to talk, on the grounds that “if I said something now, I'd be like them”; the widening distance between her parents looms like a treacherous gulf; and as everybody waits anxiously to see whether Donald can invent a worthy successor to his Magic Rose (the Tiger Soap and the Supergrow Instant Fertilizer were disappointing flops), such commonplace expressions of irritation as “Dad’ll kill us” come to have an ominous edge. Constantly prodded to break her silence, Emily thinks about talking, and comes closer and closer to forming the words, but still says nothing, even when her silence endangers flirtatious Elizabeth Ruth. When her father packs his troop into a car for a return trip to Martha’s Vineyard, it’s clear that the story is heading toward a showdown, but first-novelist Sullivan, who has a real knack for getting inside Emily without making her sound like a prodigy or a freak, keeps both the nature of her climactic revelations and their import hidden up to the very last minute—and in some ways beyond.
Emily's reason enough to look twice at this sensitive, simmering little gem of a debut.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-58195-025-X
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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