A slow-paced tale, but hopefully its sequel will pack in a little more action.
A king struggles to rule with authority in Oak’s (Anna’s Awakening, 2011, etc.) historical novel.
History remembers Charlemagne as an eighth-century Christian ruler who united Western Europe and carried the titles of King of the Franks and Holy Roman Emperor. According to Oak’s novel, he was also a man at the mercy of the women in his life. Charlemagne’s first marriage falls apart thanks in no small part to his strong-willed, meddling mother. As he battles his guilt over the situation, he realizes that he may be freed up to marry the lovely, intelligent, and kind Hildegard. Yet his mother, in a move of political expediency, has already arranged for him to marry Desiderata, the Princess of Lombardy. Neither Charlemagne nor his brother Carloman trust the proposed alliance, as the King of Lombardy is hungry for power. Yet Charlemagne allows the wedding to proceed, breaking Hildegard’s heart. Predictably, bad things soon happen. Carloman is poisoned and his widow flees to Lombardy, and the marriage between Charlemagne and Desiderata is indeed miserable. The pope is also unhappy about the new wedding, while poor Hildegard pines away for Charlemagne and bemoans his lack of true leadership. Oak’s novel hews to the historical facts of Charlemagne’s life but imagines the details of his personal relationships. She includes several intriguing plotlines; the opening scene involving murderous bandits is compelling, and moments depicting the complicated relationship between church and state (and particularly between Charlemagne and the pope) are promising. Unfortunately, they’re relegated to the background, as Oak dedicates far too much space to the king’s relationships with his mother and Hildegard. In the many scenes depicting Charlemagne’s struggles with the overbearing queen mother, she’s said to be a “master of deceit,” while he’s the “world’s biggest fool.” When he’s not consumed by his annoyance with his mother, Charlemagne moons over Hildegard, behaving more like an angst-filled teenager than a great ruler with a kingdom to worry about. When he laments, “Must I always be punished or in pain, lose the people I need,” before he wraps his arms around himself, he’s not exactly the picture of inspiration. A cliffhanger ending teases a second installment.
A slow-paced tale, but hopefully its sequel will pack in a little more action.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9842768-1-3
Page Count: 436
Publisher: At Last Communications
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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