A dark, detailed tale about the making of a fearless woman.
The spouse of Vlad the Impaler takes center stage in Bardot’s (Legends of Lust, 2019) novel.
There are abundant stories surrounding Vlad Dracula, the brutal, real-life prince of Wallachia who inspired Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In a unique take on this well-known figure, Bardot depicts Vlad’s story through the eyes of his wife, Ilona, a courageous, intelligent young woman whose cousin is the king of Hungary. The narrative chronicles Vlad and Ilona’s marriage, a love match that’s also politically expedient. Their relationship is full of emotional extremes and constant maneuvering as Ilona struggles to stay in the mercurial prince’s good graces and keep his attention, both as a confidante and as a lover. Bardot does an excellent job of portraying Ilona’s metamorphosis from a naïve young maiden to a wife who’s determined to hold on to her husband even as their evolving relationship chips away at her beliefs, morals, religion, and identity: “I did not tame the beast,” she reflects, “far from it. My husband released the beast within me.” As Ilona comes to grips with her dark side, Bardot offers the reader an unflinching account of Vlad’s brutal past. Overall, Bardot’s novel is a complex work of historical fiction that touches on politics, religion, battle strategy, and cultural mores. It also doesn’t shy away from scenes of explicit violence and passion. The author mainly details Ilona’s present-day life while leaving her background largely unrevealed. However, the narrative also jumps around in time, piecing together Vlad’s history in a series of flashbacks; it’s a journey that began with an unsettled child who was held captive and ends with a fierce, unforgiving warrior prince who’s obsessed with power and revenge. In the end, although Vlad’s story is indeed interesting, it’s Ilona’s that will truly capture readers’ imaginations. A more detailed author’s note that separates fact from fiction would have been a helpful addition, though.
A dark, detailed tale about the making of a fearless woman.Pub Date: March 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9882092-4-4
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Flores Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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