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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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