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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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
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