Rollicking good, admittedly unhistorical, fun—complete with all the dish on the great and powerful, and what they wore, that...
In Erickson’s fanciful retelling, Empress Josephine personifies, ahead of her time, the “head for business/bod for sin” dichotomy.
By dubbing this a “historical entertainment” rather than a historical novel, Erickson (The Last Wife of Henry VIII, 2006, etc.) avoids a more apt classification: gossipy historical romance. Josephine was born Rose, nickname Yeyette, to a failed sugar planter in Martinique. Her first and lifelong liaison is with Donovan de Gautier, a mysterious, sun-kissed adonis who introduces her to sex on the beach. Her platonic love is Scipion, a dashing lieutenant. Betrothed to cruel, foppish Vicomte Alexandre, Josephine journeys to Paris, where she wows the aristocracy with her Tarot fortunetelling. After bearing two children, she takes up money lending. During the French Revolution, she keeps her head; Alexandre is not so lucky. Impoverished, Josephine becomes the mistress of a wealthy military contractor. When she’s not dancing naked in the contractor’s orgy grotto, she’s feathering her own nest hawking substandard goods to the military, which is how she meets little corporal, now general Bonaparte. Josephine seemingly marries Napoleon out of curiosity, to see what happens next. Bonaparte’s coarse, scheming Corsican siblings and his harpy of a mother detest her. Bonaparte himself is so irascible, paranoiac, bilious and profligate, it’s a wonder he manages to conquer half the civilized world. Fortunately, readers share Josephine’s curiosity. How can she abide life with this monster, who castigates his older wife for failing to dress age-appropriately? He still runs cravenly to her for solace even after he’s divorced her to marry teenage Archduchess Marie-Louise. Fulfilling the destiny preordained for her by a shaman on Martinique, and following a comet, no less, Josephine travels to Russia, where she convinces Napoleon not to retreat from Moscow until the first snow—striking a blow not just for the first-wives club, but for the future of Europe!
Rollicking good, admittedly unhistorical, fun—complete with all the dish on the great and powerful, and what they wore, that an Empire-waisted fashionista could desire.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-36735-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
In his quest for easy moolah, Owen learns that the road to financial solvency can be rocky and fraught with work. Greene (Owen Foote, Soccer Star, 1998, etc.) touches upon the often-thorny issue of chores and allowances: Owen’s mom wants him to help out because he’s part of the family and not just for the money—while Owen wants the money without having to do tedious household chores. This universal dilemma leaves Owen without funds and eagerly searching for ways to make a quick buck. His madcap schemes range from original—a “free” toilet demonstration that costs 50 cents—to disastrous, as during the trial run of his children’s fishing video, Owen ends up hooking his ear instead of a trout. Enlisting the aid of his stalwart, if long-suffering, friend Joseph, the two form a dog-walking club that becomes vastly restricted in clientele after Owen has a close encounter with an incontinent, octogenarian canine. Ultimately, Owen learns a valuable lesson about work and money when an unselfish action is generously rewarded. These sudden riches motivate Owen to consider wiser investments for his money than plastic vomit. Greene’s crisp writing style and wry humor is on-target for young readers. Brief chapters revolving around a significant event or action and fast pacing are an effective draw for tentative readers. Weston’s (Space Guys!, p. 392, etc.) black-and-white illustrations, ranging in size from quarter- to full-page, deftly portray Owen’s humorous escapades. A wise, witty addition to Greene’s successful series. (Fiction. 8-10)
Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2000
ISBN: 0-618-02369-0
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
An exuberant comic opera set to the music of life.
The versatile and accomplished McBride (Five Carat Soul, 2017, etc.) returns with a dark urban farce crowded with misjudged signals, crippling sorrows, and unexpected epiphanies.
It's September 1969, just after Apollo 11 and Woodstock. In a season of such events, it’s just as improbable that in front of 16 witnesses occupying the crowded plaza of a Brooklyn housing project one afternoon, a hobbling, dyspeptic, and boozy old church deacon named Cuffy Jasper "Sportcoat" Lambkin should pull out a .45-caliber Luger pistol and shoot off an ear belonging to the neighborhood’s most dangerous drug dealer. The 19-year-old victim’s name is Deems Clemens, and Sportcoat had coached him to be “the best baseball player the projects had ever seen” before he became “a poison-selling murderous meathead.” Everybody in the project presumes that Sportcoat is now destined to violently join his late wife, Hettie, in the great beyond. But all kinds of seemingly disconnected people keep getting in destiny's way, whether it’s Sportcoat’s friend Pork Sausage or Potts, a world-weary but scrupulous White policeman who’s hoping to find Sportcoat fast enough to protect him from not only Deems’ vengeance, but the malevolent designs of neighborhood kingpin Butch Moon. All their destines are somehow intertwined with those of Thomas “The Elephant” Elefante, a powerful but lonely Mafia don who’s got one eye trained on the chaos set off by the shooting and another on a mysterious quest set in motion by a stranger from his crime-boss father’s past. There are also an assortment of salsa musicians, a gentle Nation of Islam convert named Soup, and even a tribe of voracious red ants that somehow immigrated to the neighborhood from Colombia and hung around for generations, all of which seems like too much stuff for any one book to handle. But as he's already shown in The Good Lord Bird (2013), McBride has a flair for fashioning comedy whose buoyant outrageousness barely conceals both a steely command of big and small narrative elements and a river-deep supply of humane intelligence.
An exuberant comic opera set to the music of life.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1672-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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