By the author of Amanda/Miranda and other entertainments: a four-generational set of stout-hearted ladies—tough, wily, dwarfing their men, independent, and passing along their survivalist strengths to their daughters (often at a chilly or chary distance). Lena Wheatley tells her story of the wagon-train trek from Illinois to California in 1850, when she was a shy, wary 14: she loses her mother to TB and loses friends, particularly her "idol," the beautiful, graceful Sarah Ann, to an Indian attack; only after the searing journey is over does Lena, scalded by loss, dare to take comfort in the remnants of family—her adoptive Pa and Sarah Ann's wounded brother Lorenzo; she'll marry miner/farmer Evan after Pa's death. And then. . . Sarah Ann is found!—now a tattooed "savage," mind-crippled and pregnant by a Mojave husband. The two women are thereafter linked for life: Lena's child is whiny Opal, whom she idolizes; Sarah Ann will bear Effie, whom Lena will reluctantly adopt as her own. So, in generation #2, Effie tells of the move to a boarding house in Nebraska—where gruff, kind Sophie Wilhelm takes on widowed Lena as housekeeper, Sarah Ann as cook, grooming the despised Effie as a society beauty; and Effie's infatuation for Lorenzo forces Lena to tell the truth of her parentage. Effie's daughter Constance will host the next segment—as the narrative leaps from hard-time brothel days (Lena must diversify after the great fire of 1875) to silks and furs and San Francisco, where Effie, married to theater impresario Anton Nicholas, is now "Eve Waring"—a turquoise-eyed beauty who'll pack houses as an actress (and net the Prince of Wales). Constance's tale, however, spreads into other family matters: horrid Aunt Opal has married and produced twin boys, one of whom, gambler and sadist Terry, marries Constance's best friend Rose (who'll take terrible revenge); Constance marries Englishman Hugh, who's killed in the Boer war (but waiting at home is her fellow architect Joe); Constance's son Anton meets Rose's daughter June during WW I; June later dies. So the last testimony is Anton's tribute in 1939 to a Family of Women. . . and his own young daughter. Winey, full-bodied, gossipy, offering both calico and satin: a romantically styled winner.
Pub Date: April 18, 1983
ISBN: 0440187907
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1983
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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