Brown and Kelly create a richly detailed world, but need to more seamlessly marry facts with story.
Brown, with assistance from researcher and co-author Kelly, debuts with this historical novel of piracy and Colonial America.
Young Maria Hallett, having lost both her parents, works as a governess to her aunt’s children in early 18th-century Cape Cod. Her friend Isaac Doane is employed at the novel’s namesake tavern, and although he is enamored of Ms. Hallett, his shyness prevents him from becoming her suitor. But that’s not the case for historical pirate “Black Sam” Bellamy, who strides ashore, swiftly sweeps Maria off her feet and leaves her with child while he goes plundering in the West Indies for several months. By the time he returns to the coast of Massachusetts, circumstances have changed for the worse, as the child has passed away and Maria is being held criminally accountable. Although the real Bellamy died in a storm before reaching land, Brown and Kelly imagine what would have happened had he lived and found his way back into Maria’s life. The book’s often gorgeous descriptions and impressive vocabulary help bring the world of Colonial New England to life, through its flora, fauna, geography and people. The characters populating Brown and Kelly’s world, both fictional and fictionalized, are imbued with great depth. The authors’ zeal to bring so much of their vast research to the page, however, creates problems for the narrative, as the story is consistently interrupted by italicized sections of commentary, some of which reads like informational footnotes and all of which is distracting if not beside the point. And while scene-setting is essential to a book such as this, too often the plot is forced to sit still for it, and too much of the action—including most of the actual pirating—takes place off the page.
Brown and Kelly create a richly detailed world, but need to more seamlessly marry facts with story.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-1452082097
Page Count: 272
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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