Ineffably, incoherently, inexplicably inane.
Legendary lady pirate Anne Bonny improbably becomes a feminist heroine in this florid reimagining of her life and crimes, courtesy of Time magazine senior editor Farley (My Favorite War, 1996).
The story begins in County Cork around the turn of the 18th century, where Anne, privileged only child of a prosperous landowner, asserts her independence in sporting competition with other children, unaware that her family’s fortunes are imperiled. Her father’s gambling debts send him to America, and Anne and her “Ma” in later pursuit of him aboard a ship carrying slaves (and dangers), whereupon Anne ends up essentially orphaned and alone in South Carolina, thence—spurred by a conveniently acquired love of seafaring—to the Bahamas, where she dresses as a man and auditions, as it were, for a freebooter’s career. “I am of a sufficient height and with broad enough shoulders, that my secret was never guessed,” she confides, relating her exploits from the perspective of old age. Tavern-hopping, she meets Erroll Flynn–like pirate Calico Jack Rackam, joins his dastardly crew aboard the William, and embarks on the adventure she feels born for (“I never felt my womanhood so intensely as when I became a man of the sea”). Astonishments proliferate, as the William savages Spanish galleons, earning vast riches and the notoriety that brings its “men” to the gallows—saving Anne and a captured seaman, Read (also possessed of a remarkable secret). Well, why not? Our Heroine is a paragon of ethnic and gender sensitivity whose adaptation to the piratical “lifestyle” (her word) is eased by her matchless daring, eloquent familiarity with Shakespeare and the classics, and supremacy at chess (the latter skill impresses Calico Jack and leads to his happy discovery of her more purely biological attributes). Absurdity rules the waves, justice is served and bonny Anne lives on to tell thee.
Ineffably, incoherently, inexplicably inane.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-8245-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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