More period exotica by the author of such languorous entertainments as Interview with a Vampire and The Feast of All Saints: this time Rice explores the musical demiworld of the 18th-century castrati—those flute-voiced, angelic singers who as boys were "mutilated to make a choir of seraphim, their song a cry to heaven that heaven did not hear." The star of this terrible show is primo Tonio Treschi—but before his entrance there's the sadly common-place history of Tonio's teacher/lover Guido Maffeo, a peasant child, castrated at six for the sake of heavenly music, who loses his voice at 17 but finally settles down to gifted teaching and composition at the Castrati music school in Naples. And it's at about this time in Venice that handsome 15-year-old Tonio, son of the patrician Andrea and young melancholy Marianna, finds his life shadowed and then threatened when he learns that his "dead" half-brother Carlo is very much alive: after Andrea's death, the sinister, disinherited Carlo (who is really Tonio's father!) neatly eliminates Tonio by ordering his abduction and castration. So, forced to announce publicly that this was his own decision to save his beautiful singing voice, Tonio arrives at Guido's conservatory, nearly insane with rage and grief. But on the flanks of Mount Vesuvius he accepts two tasks: a) he swears Revenge on Carlo; b) he will continue to sing up a storm. And later he will ponder his sexual identity with: Guido, a life-long love; gentle feline boys; "masculine" men—including a learned Roman Cardinal; and then the lovely Christina Grimaldi, a painter. Thus, Tonio probes the essence of maleness and femaleness: ". . . if I were part of one or the other or even part of both." And finally it will be Tonio's transvestite allure—he is at last persuaded to take a female role in Guido's opera—that will inch Carlo to his doom. . . in a marvelously shuddering showdown. Rice has convincingly reconstructed performance and training highlights in this era of ornamental vocalization; and the dialogue, assassin-filled plot, and erotica moments all oom-pah away to a splendidly flowery operatic tempo—con amore, con brio, con carnage.
Pub Date: Sept. 14, 1982
ISBN: 0099471388
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1982
PERSPECTIVES
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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