The story is engaging as far as it goes, but such rich material cries out for greater narrative risks.
A wealthy man’s daughter breaks young F. Scott Fitzgerald’s heart and inspires the literature that defined a generation.
In 1915, a late-night kiss during a bobsled ride fuels a semester’s worth of torrid correspondence between Ginevra Perry, a boarder at the Westover School in Connecticut, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, a sophomore at Princeton. Once she is home in Lake Forest for the summer, however, Scott’s letters lose her interest, and his late August visit to her parent’s Italianate mansion is disastrous. Ginevra, whose favor has settled elsewhere, unceremoniously dumps Scott and marries Billy Granger, a dashing flyboy from her social set. After WWI, they move to Chicago and take their place in society. A few years later, Ginevra, unhappily pregnant with her second child and bored, reads an article about F. Scott Fitzgerald and his glamorous wife, Zelda. Ginevra scours Scott’s fiction and finds herself in many of his cold, shallow debutantes: Isabelle Borgé in This Side of Paradise, the Josephine Perry stories and, most famously, in Daisy Buchanan, the love of Jay Gatsby’s life. Keeping abreast of Scott and Zelda becomes Ginevra’s shadow life. She even travels to Paris in the hope of running into them, only to learn from Sylvia Beach that they have decamped to the south of France. Meanwhile, Ginevra’s marriage unravels and her son’s mental instability goes unnoticed. Eventually, a series of impulsive acts leads to a scandal and divorce. In 1936, Ginevra finds herself living in a one-bedroom apartment with a two-burner hotplate—once again mirroring Scott’s work (he has just published The Crack-Up). Preston (Jackie by Josie, 1997 etc.) bases her character on Fitzgerald’s real-life first love, Ginevra King, who was the prototype for many of the rich girls Fitzgerald’s “poor boy” characters shouldn’t marry.
The story is engaging as far as it goes, but such rich material cries out for greater narrative risks.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-618-53725-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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