A charming Victorian-era tale of love, loss, and family connections.
A mysterious piece of music offers links to the past in Kennedy’s (Holybourne, 2017, etc.) latest historical novel.
Marianne Mandeville and her husband, Charles, enjoy a contented life on their vast estate, Winthrope. Loving, compassionate Marianne’s free-spirited ways charm her husband but vex her parents and mother-in-law, who wish that she were more formal and less generous with the Roma people who live on the estate. A talented pianist, Marianne is enchanted by a partially completed composition that she discovered on a trip to the village. When Charles dies in a horse-riding accident, Marianne is bereft. Devastated, she goes horseback riding in a storm in an attempt to end her life. After she’s thrown from her steed and knocked unconscious, she wakes to find a tiny miracle: a baby girl, the sole survivor of a tragic carriage accident. The only clue to the infant’s identity is a piece of music found in a nearby trunk. Titled “Georgiana,” the completed composition matches the partial one from the town. Marianne raises the girl, now named Georgiana, as her daughter, but as she gets older, the youngster wants to learn more about her family. The search leads them both on a remarkable journey to reunite a composer with his precious legacy. Inspired by the musical pieces “Algonquin Trails” and “Stormy Sunday” by composer Hennie Bekker, Kennedy’s novel is a keenly observed meditation on the love of a parent for a child and the healing power of music. Marianne is a beguiling heroine who’s shown to be committed to treating everyone, from her husband to her servants to the Roma living nearby, with compassion and dignity. Although he has a limited role, Marianne’s husband, Charles, provides an equal amount of love and understanding, and their scenes together are playful and passionate. In many respects, however, the novel is as much Georgiana’s story as Marianne’s, especially in the sections in which they search for Georgiana’s surviving family. The narrative moves at a steady pace throughout, with the composition “Georgiana” playing a key role. The strong supporting cast also includes Molly Bickers, Marianne’s beloved governess.
A charming Victorian-era tale of love, loss, and family connections.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-945494-13-0
Page Count: 219
Publisher: Kennedy Literary
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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