With an ending that is never in question, this tale offers the pleasant experience of simply enjoying a lighthearted frolic...
An angel and a playboy find love in Matthews’ (The Lost Letter, 2017, etc.) latest Victorian romance.
Valentine March is all alone in the world after the death of her father, a small-town English vicar. With few options, Valentine takes a position as a companion to the abominable Lady Brightwell. Despite some unattractive clothing and a lower social status, Valentine’s beauty and innocence attract the attention of Tristan Sinclair, the infamous Viscount St. Ashton. When the love-struck couple are caught in a passionate kiss, the playboy swears off his life of gambling, brawling, and women and promises to make an honest woman of Valentine. But his father, the Earl of Lynden, has other ideas about his heir’s future. He sends Tristan to his remote estate in Northumberland and, in a Cinderella moment, ascertains that Valentine is a woman of high breeding and connects her with her long-lost and wealthy family. Happily, the two lovers are determined to uphold their promises, though they both battle uncertainty regarding the other’s true feelings. Despite a formulaic plot and predictable outcome, Matthews’ tale hits all the high notes of a great romance novel. Valentine, the heroine, is a spunky underdog completely unaware of her own beauty and uninterested in material wealth. Tristan is a smoldering hunk of love, a bad boy with a soft heart who just wants someone to believe in him. Their mutual attraction is a joy to behold. But this romance is not a bodice-ripper. Except for a few steamy kisses, this is a rather chaste love story that focuses on emotions rather than sex scenes. Matthews is a polished writer who knows her genre and audience. Several scenes, as when Tristan swoops in to boot out Valentine’s sleazy former suitor, are particularly entertaining and allow the Viscount to play the hero. “No one has ever stood up for me before,” Valentine gasps. “You were magnificent.” Cue the satisfied sighs of romance readers everywhere.
With an ending that is never in question, this tale offers the pleasant experience of simply enjoying a lighthearted frolic in the past.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9990364-3-3
Page Count: 245
Publisher: Perfectly Proper Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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