An engrossing tale about British expatriates in India during a tumultuous political time, well-suited for fans of Indian...
In this debut historical novel, a British woman living in India with her family in the 1850s struggles to find love.
George opens her tale as Edwina Hardingham is visiting her sister, Katherine, in Calcutta. Edwina has traveled from Simla, an area in the hills where she lives with her parents, to be present for the birth of her sister’s child. When Edwina makes a brief visit to the home of Indian friends in Calcutta, she and her servant are attacked by a band of thieves. Edwina fears for her life, but a lone man appears to thwart the assault. After chasing off the bandits, the man introduces himself as William Grayson and escorts Edwina back to Katherine’s. Before long, Edwina must return home. She finds herself infatuated with Grayson, and is delighted when he appears in Simla. As they grow better acquainted, Grayson quickly disappoints Edwina, displaying a fickle nature that extinguishes her affection for him. But his shortcomings highlight the positive attributes of another man she has just met in Simla, James Henry Davenport. Unfortunately, Davenport believes Edwina has eyes only for Grayson. Worse yet, before she can reveal her feelings for Davenport, he is whisked away to fight against the Indian insurrection that has begun sweeping through the country. With a sudden shift in tone, the book pauses its focus on courtship and becomes an action-packed war chronicle, deftly detailing Davenport’s attempts to battle the Indian rebels and locate his sister, whom he believes to be at risk in light of the general political unrest in India. Although the book contains two vastly different sections, perhaps attempting to accomplish too much in one volume, both stories are absorbing, and the author ultimately weaves everything together in the end. This well-researched tale illustrates the cultural and political divide that pervaded India in the mid-19th century. In a narrative voice that conjures both Jane Austen and Erich Maria Remarque, George provides intriguing and thorough details about the Indian revolt against British rule in the 1850s.
An engrossing tale about British expatriates in India during a tumultuous political time, well-suited for fans of Indian history and Victorian literature.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73226-981-1
Page Count: 307
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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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