All in all, a lively and historically grounded reimagining of two Tudor survivors.
Harper, author of an inventive, long-running mystery series starring Elizabeth I as sleuth (The Hooded Hawke, 2007, etc.), now depicts the monarch through the eyes of her most loyal courtier.
Like her eventual mentor Thomas Cromwell (Henry VIII’s fixer-in-chief), Kat Champernowne is of humble origins. Her father, a beekeeper from an impoverished branch of Devonshire nobility, doesn’t seem unduly upset by the suspicious drowning of Kat’s mother Cecily. With scandalous haste, he marries the vain, scheming hussy who was the last person to see Cecily alive. Kat yearns to escape Maud, who treats her as a drudge and nursemaid for a growing brood of half-siblings. Her chance comes when she does a good turn for Cromwell, who procures her an education at the manor house of wealthy distant relations. Then she’s off to Henry’s court to serve Anne Boleyn—and to spy on her for Cromwell. Kat’s devotion to Anne extends through her coronation and her execution approximately 1,000 days later. Shortly before she faces the headsman, the doomed queen gives Kat a ruby locket-ring with facing portraits of Anne and her daughter Elizabeth, whose gender precipitated her swift fall from favor. She begs Kat to cherish and protect the princess always. Elizabeth’s mettle is severely tested: She’s disinherited in favor of younger brother Edward, very nearly seduced by villainous rake Thomas Seymour (who raped Kat in her early days at court), displaced again by her cousin Jane Grey’s ill-fated coup, followed by her elder sister Mary’s accession to the throne. While treading the delicate line between deference and the discipline young Elizabeth sorely needs, Kat outwits and outlives Seymour and his many blackmail attempts. She confounds her questioners during two prison terms endured as a result of various power shifts. Unfortunately, perhaps because of scant written records concerning Kat, she’s a much sketchier character than her royal charge.
All in all, a lively and historically grounded reimagining of two Tudor survivors.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-399-15618-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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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