An engaging story about a brilliant woman who risks everything.
In this fictionalization of a true story, a young Black woman named Belle da Costa Green passes for White and rises to become the first director of J.P. Morgan’s library.
In this extensively researched historical novel, we see Belle from the time she’s a young woman born Belle Greener, daughter of the first Black man to graduate from Harvard. After he abandons his family, Belle makes a pact with her mother and siblings to change their surname and pass for White. They swear secrecy. None will have children, for fear of being found out: “Six irrevocably intertwined fates, and if any one of them were to fall short, it would bring the others down with it.” Brilliant, bookish, and unsentimental, Belle gets a job at the Princeton library, where she meets Junius Spencer Morgan and eventually finds her way to his uncle J.P., who’s looking for someone to oversee his new project. Belle’s literary expertise helps her secure Morgan’s trust, and he rewards her with the responsibility of shaping the library’s collection. Belle closes herself off to thoughts of her heritage or her former life. Her focus on success remains singular. Morgan is mercurial and possessive. Belle is formidable. She’s torn by twin feelings: “the intoxication of feeling herself to be free, and the frustration of having to submit to the tyranny of her master.” Eventually, Morgan sends her to Europe to bid on items at auction; the library is entirely hers to shape. Yet she’s aware at all times that she has “a career based entirely on the protection of an individual more rich and powerful than [herself].” Tension builds as Belle tries to avoid losing the career that supports her family. As she tries to outbid the other collectors of the day in a new world that’s full of wealth and eager to grab up the world’s treasures, she presents a carefully shaped persona. She adopts a new background because she believes it’s the only way to succeed in a broken system. Passing for White puts Belle’s life at risk every day. She’s consumed by the library and her secret; scenes with her real-life historical counterparts are fleshed out with dialogue drawn from primary sources such as letters. Occasionally these conversations feel stilted, but Belle's story is so exceptional that readers won’t mind.
An engaging story about a brilliant woman who risks everything.Pub Date: June 14, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-60945-758-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Endicott’s latest novel is a quiet, elegant triumph with no easy answers.
Two sisters sail around the world.
It’s 1911, and after her much older half sister marries a ship’s captain, teenage Kay joins them onboard the Morning Light for a trip around the world. Their strict father has recently died, and as they travel, the sisters find themselves still haunted by his legacy: He’d run a school for Native American children in remote Canada, where scores of students apparently died from tuberculosis. Now Kay suffers from nightmares so severe she wakes up screaming. But as the trip continues, both Kay and her sister, Thea, begin to have a look around them. Kay begins studying ancient Greek with a goofy English pastor who’s joined them. Things change when Thea, who longs for a child, adopts a young boy from a poor Micronesian island. Kay is troubled by the adoption, though she can’t immediately articulate why. Endicott depicts her characters with great delicacy and sympathy. Kay, especially, is a wonder to behold: She’s barely a teenager when the novel begins, and to witness her first encounters with the world, as she quietly unravels her own feelings and beliefs about what she sees, is simply marvelous. The novel’s second half shifts in time and mood in a way that feels both surprising and exactly right. There is so much in this book to linger over, from Kay and Thea’s relationship with each other to the strength and autonomy of Kay’s mind to Endicott’s lyrical descriptions of the sea and the ship. It’s a novel to return to again and again.
Endicott’s latest novel is a quiet, elegant triumph with no easy answers.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-324-00706-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
