A slight story about three girlhood friends, now in midlife crisis, who take a London holiday that miraculously takes care of all their problems. Reunited just outside of St. Louis for a funeral, Julia, a hardened New York interior designer; Margo, a recently divorced schoolmarm; and society lady Les can see clearly through each others— threadbare facades of happiness. Through flashback we learn of the three women’s youth: how Les became pregnant to catch Harry, the richest college boy in town, how studious Margo entered into a self-sacrificing marriage to an academic, and how Julia’s fierce determination to leave provincial life fueled her relentless drive for success—and how, though all goals were achieved, the women are unfulfilled by their long-ago fantasies of perfection. When a random act of violence puts Margo out of commission and her arm in a sling, the three decide to visit London. They stay with a Mrs. Smith-Porter, a mysterious woman with an invented identity who serves as their fairy godmother. Mrs. Smith-Porter (whose oh-so-tasteful and elite bed and breakfast is furnished with exhaustively described antiques) introduces Julia to Hugh, a roguishly handsome antiques dealer, and’surprise!—a landed lord, whom she falls quickly in love with. Margo also has an opportunity to fix her life when her surly teenage daughter runs away (the girl tagged along to rendezvous with her boyfriend, studying abroad) and her ex-husband and his’surprise!—male lover come to sort things out, allowing Margo the closure she needed to get on with her life, which she promptly does by hooking up with a widowed London doctor. Which leaves Les, whose terminal ennui is erased when Mrs. Smith-Porter is accidentally killed by a speeding truck and Les decides to stay in London, too, taking over the B&B business and escorting socialites like herself around town. A thoroughly silly, predictable tale from a prolific YA author.
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-87368-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998
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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