Rich, stylish, turn-of-the-century vampire spy novel set in England, Paris, Vienna, Constantinople, and on the trains tying the le CarrÇ-ish spy networks together: a sequel to Hambly's memorable Those Who Hunt the Night (1988). Hambly at last outdoes early Rice for fine writing while avoiding Rice's light lavender hand. Every page shows immense research and attention to Continental textures of life nearly a century ago as WW I rumbles in the far distance. In the first novel, Hambly showed us Edwardian England though the eyes of ex-spy James Asher and young wife Lydia, and through the undead eyes of London's oldest vampire, the Spanish aristocrat Don Simon Ysidro. That initial installment focused on a monstrous mutant vampire who was killing all the vampires of London and drinking their blood. Now the plot grows into parallel lines, with James and Lydia apart and traveling separately with vampires toward an eventual rejoining. The two plotlines move like moonlit chapters by Sax Rohmer (with vampires replacing Fu Manchu and the Yellow Peril), the story of James chasing vampire spies alternating with episodes from a Louisa May Alcott thriller about Lydia. Vampires, it seems, are as territorial as birds and get highly upset if a London bloodsucker invades the Paris or Vienna feeding grounds and willy- nilly brings on police activity after promiscuously sucking dry improper victims. James discovers that England's enemies have hired vampire double agents, including the Earl of Ernchester, now a vampire, who has left London for the Continent accompanied by top Hungarian vampire Ignace Karolyi, seemingly intent on selling his vampire abilities of getting in and out of places like mist through a keyhole. Lydia, however, discovers that James is in great danger and, protected by Don Ysidro, sets out to save him. The climax: a tragicomic opera among woman-hating, top-lofty Turkish vampires. Pages to read gold-stained by lamplight. (First printing of 50,000; author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-38102-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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