The big set pieces are more impressive than the realistically meandering odyssey that threads them together. The most...
The death of Alfred the Great leaves what we know as England up for grabs, and Lord Uhtred of Bebbanburg (Death of Kings, 2012, etc.) is caught in the middle of it all.
Connoisseurs of conflict can start with the hero’s name, which he’s done his best to pass on. When the son he’s named Uhtred converts to Christianity and becomes a priest, Uhtred dubs him Father Judas and declares that his youngest son, Osbert, is Uhtred instead. Nor is Uhtred widely considered to be lord of Bebbanburg, a northern stronghold his uncle Uhtred (hmm) has seized and plans to pass on to his own Uhtred. Unable to stomach King Alfred’s successor, Æthelred of Mercia, whose estranged wife he’s in love with, cursed by Bishop Wulfheard after he accidentally kills old Abbot Wihtred, and burned out of his holdings outside Cirrenceastre in modern Gloucestershire by the warlord Cnut Ranulfson, Uhtred would seem to have no direction if Cnut, upon returning Sigunn, the woman of Uhtred's he’d carried off, had not asked him to find Cnut’s own abducted wife and son. Instead of searching for them, Uhtred, who’s never happy unless he’s fighting or scheming, sails off to Bebbanburg with the remainder of his followers in a bold gamble to surprise his usurping uncle and seize his castle. When his plan doesn’t go quite as he’d intended, Uhtred is left to journey west to Ceaster, where he’ll find Cnut’s missing wife and child and prepare to come face to face with the fearsome warlord one last time.
The big set pieces are more impressive than the realistically meandering odyssey that threads them together. The most consistent motif is Uhtred’s undying and principled hostility to “the nailed god” of Christianity and the threat he represents to the warrior code Uhtred so perfectly embodies.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-196970-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
A masterly encapsulation of modern Russian history, this book more than fulfills the promise of Towles' stylish debut, Rules...
Sentenced to house arrest in Moscow's Metropol Hotel by a Bolshevik tribunal for writing a poem deemed to encourage revolt, Count Alexander Rostov nonetheless lives the fullest of lives, discovering the depths of his humanity.
Inside the elegant Metropol, located near the Kremlin and the Bolshoi, the Count slowly adjusts to circumstances as a "Former Person." He makes do with the attic room, to which he is banished after residing for years in a posh third-floor suite. A man of refined taste in wine, food, and literature, he strives to maintain a daily routine, exploring the nooks and crannies of the hotel, bonding with staff, accepting the advances of attractive women, and forming what proves to be a deeply meaningful relationship with a spirited young girl, Nina. "We are bound to find comfort from the notion that it takes generations for a way of life to fade," says the companionable narrator. For the Count, that way of life ultimately becomes less about aristocratic airs and privilege than generosity and devotion. Spread across four decades, this is in all ways a great novel, a nonstop pleasure brimming with charm, personal wisdom, and philosophic insight. Though Stalin and Khrushchev make their presences felt, Towles largely treats politics as a dark, distant shadow. The chill of the political events occurring outside the Metropol is certainly felt, but for the Count and his friends, the passage of time is "like the turn of a kaleidoscope." Not for nothing is Casablanca his favorite film. This is a book in which the cruelties of the age can't begin to erase the glories of real human connection and the memories it leaves behind.
A masterly encapsulation of modern Russian history, this book more than fulfills the promise of Towles' stylish debut, Rules of Civility(2011).Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-670-02619-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A thoughtful, boldly imagined ripsnorter that broadens inventive possibilities for the antebellum novel.
High adventure fraught with cliffhanger twists marks this runaway-slave narrative, which leaps, sails, and soars from Caribbean cane fields to the fringes of the frozen Arctic and across a whole ocean.
It's 1830 on the island of Barbados, and a 12-year-old slave named George Washington Black wakes up every hot morning to cruelties administered to him and other black men, women, and children toiling on a sugar plantation owned by the coldblooded Erasmus Wilde. Christopher, one of Erasmus’ brothers, is a flamboyant oddball with insatiable curiosity toward scientific matters and enlightened views on social progress. Upon first encountering young Wash, Christopher, also known as Titch, insists on acquiring him from his brother as his personal valet and research assistant. Neither Erasmus nor Wash is pleased by this transaction, and one of the Wildes' cousins, the dour, mysterious Philip, is baffled by it. But then Philip kills himself in Wash’s presence, and Christopher, knowing the boy will be unjustly blamed and executed for the death, activates his hot air balloon, the Cloud-cutter, to carry both himself and Wash northward into a turbulent storm. So begins one of the most unconventional escapes from slavery ever chronicled as Wash and Titch lose their balloon but are carried the rest of the way to America by a ship co-captained by German-born twins of wildly differing temperaments. Once in Norfolk, Virginia, they meet with a sexton with a scientific interest in dead tissue and a moral interest in ferrying other runaway slaves through the Underground Railroad. Rather than join them on their journey, Wash continues to travel with Titch for a reunion with the Wildes' father, an Arctic explorer, north of Canada. Their odyssey takes even more unexpected turns, and soon Wash finds himself alone and adrift in the unfamiliar world as “a disfigured black boy with a scientific turn of mind…running, always running from the dimmest of shadows.” Canadian novelist Edugyan (Half-Blood Blues, 2012, etc.) displays as much ingenuity and resourcefulness as her main characters in spinning this yarn, and the reader’s expectations are upended almost as often as her hero’s.
A thoughtful, boldly imagined ripsnorter that broadens inventive possibilities for the antebellum novel.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52142-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
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