A thoroughly satisfying classic for those who love long, slow Victorian family dramas.
The Duke of Omnium’s eponymous children test his mettle by falling in with crooked gamblers, losing their hearts to commoners, and backing the wrong party in this newly unabridged version of a classic by one of the great novelists of Victorian England.
Poor Plantagenet Palliser, Duke of Omnium! His beloved duchess, the strong-willed Lady Glencora, has died suddenly, leaving him in charge of what today’s bloggers would call the family’s emotional labor: guiding his equally strong-willed children as they make a series of what he sees as irresponsible decisions. Although the Pallisers have always been Liberals—the present duke, in fact, served his party as prime minister in a previous novel—the eldest son and heir, young Lord Silverbridge, has decided to stand for Parliament as a Conservative. To top it off, after telling the duke he intends to marry an earl’s daughter, Silverbridge falls in love with—horrors!—an American. The duke’s daughter, the beautiful and virtuous Lady Mary, has also fallen in love with someone inappropriate: Mr. Francis Tregear, the Conservative younger son of a Cornish nobody. The late duchess supported the match, but she’s no longer around to coax her husband into it or dry her daughter’s tears when he refuses. Then the youngest Palliser, Lord Gerald, gets himself thrown out of Cambridge for sneaking off to the races and finds himself unable to cover his gambling debts. When the novel was first published in 1880, Trollope’s publisher insisted he chop it from four volumes to three. Now a team of scholars has combed through the manuscript and restored the missing 65,000 words, giving modern readers the chance to amuse themselves by guessing which they were or which they should have been: the endless fox-hunting chapters? The gravely satirical parliamentary scenes? This is the final novel in Trollope’s Palliser series, and readers of the previous five will enjoy glimpses of their important characters, such as Phineas Finn (of Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux). But Trollope’s attentive psychological portraits—especially of the shy, inflexible, honorable duke and of the ineffectively manipulative Lady Mabel Grex, the one-time sweetheart of both Francis Tregear and Lord Silverbridge—make the book stand on its own.
A thoroughly satisfying classic for those who love long, slow Victorian family dramas.Pub Date: April 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-90781-8
Page Count: 840
Publisher: Everyman’s Library
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© 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.
