An entertaining, thoughtful story of old-fashioned romance complicated by dawning modern mores.
A teenage girl in 19th-century Denmark navigates first love and widening life prospects in this rich historical novel based on the life of artist and ethnographer Emilie Demant Hatt.
In the summer of 1887 in the village of Selde, 14-year-old Emilie—“Nik” to her family—is delighted when Carl Nielsen, a 22-year-old musician and budding composer, arrives for an extended stay, along with Nik’s rich Aunt Marie, his benefactress. Carl is talented, charming, and soulful, and the two are soon inseparable—until Nik’s prettier older sister, Maj, returns from teachers’ college. She starts monopolizing Carl’s time with piano duets while also vacillating over Frederik Brandt, an army officer who’s courting her. Sjoholm weaves these romantic entanglements with subtlety and sensitivity and sets them against the growing suffragist movement; Maj’s desire for a career and Nik’s artistic and scientific interests sit uneasily alongside their expected roles as wives and mothers. The novel’s second half takes Nik, Maj, and Carl to Copenhagen, where these conflicts only intensify. Nik and Carl secretly agree to marry once his musical career takes off, but Nik is put off by his incessant pawing and evidence that he’s an unreliable cad. Meanwhile, Maj gravitates further to the women’s rights movement, spurred by a deep relationship with feminist Eva. Throughout, the sisters brave a sexist world that imposes exasperating constraints—Nik can’t respectably walk city streets without a chaperone, for example—while offering new glimmers of freedom and self-fulfillment. Sjoholm (The Palace of the Snow Queen, 2007, etc.) fictionalizes the real-life stories of Hatt and Nielsen (who later became Denmark’s greatest composer) by joining time-honored marriage plots with a socially acute novel of ideas. There’s plenty of Jane Austen–like drollery here—“Oh, to be loved by a young man who has an opinion about sculpture,” trills one character—but also earnest engagement with contemporary intellectual debates on everything from Darwinism to free love. The latter can lead to some stilted dialogue: “The message of Nietzsche, correct me if I’m wrong, is that there’s room at the top for only a few, and those few are not women.” Still, Sjoholm gives readers vibrant characters whose personal travails are all the more engrossing for the cultural upheavals that energize them.
An entertaining, thoughtful story of old-fashioned romance complicated by dawning modern mores.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9883567-4-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: Cedar Street Editions
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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