Steeped in period detail and political backbiting in a richly imagined world, but needs a more engaging narrative.
An epic fictional Norse saga set in the ninth century, featuring royalty, repressed love, battles, and the raw appeal of untrammeled nature.
Rich with Viking lore and fact, this compelling family saga involves royalty, territorial battles, and the fraught tensions of the love that dare not speak its name. The tale begins by outlining the relationship between the newly minted king and queen of Herius, who are sailing to an unknown territory. The eye-poppingly named scout Cnut is sent to check out the new land, leaving the king and queen to some rather clunky exposition. Indeed, the entire book tries hard to evoke the great weight of history, which makes for plodding reading: “ ‘Oh Abriel, it is such a curse!’ exclaimed Edwin with a wave of effeminate emotion. ‘To punish me, Padraic whips me mercilessly whenever I show the slightest interest in another man. Yet, I cannot help it. It is who I am! Who would have thought a father could be so cruel to his son?’ ” Not all is well in the kingdom, and tensions simmer among all characters. Oddr, the most poignant and developed character, serves as the book’s emotional backbone. First described as an Angel of Death, Oddr experiences a full and satisfying character arc throughout the story. Ultimately, the book pleasingly wraps up loose ends with an elegant symmetrical narrative. Indeed, structurally and factually, the book is engrossing; however, the prose, especially dialogue, could use an injection of humanity. One warrior describes his cherished weapon: “It was taken from me by Bjorn Kormaksson. There was a time when I could not defeat him. As such, he took my prized sword from me.”
Steeped in period detail and political backbiting in a richly imagined world, but needs a more engaging narrative.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-0989929189
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Voyageur Books, LLC
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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