Authentic, exciting and well-researched.
In Adele, Grace and Celine–the most recent literary offspring of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre–Moise grants readers a glimpse into the lives of three women connected to Mr. Rochester.
Adele Varens was an inquisitive, intuitive child while growing up at Thornfield Manor, the home of her guardian, Edward Rochester. She discovered a crazy woman in the attic early in her stay, and could also sense the connection between her governess, Jane, and the man she would eventually knowas her father, Rochester himself. Adele’s natural gift of insight comes in handy when she becomes one of the first women to attend university in London and during the war in Crimea where she works alongside Florence Nightingale. When she marries Sir Garnet Gresham and settles at Drayton Abbey, Adele eschews a life of leisure. Instead, she works hard to restore an herb garden to glory, raises her children, makes friends and keeps up with current scientific knowledge and theory. When Adele inherits the letters that passed between her mother, Celine, and Grace, the servant who took care of the mad woman in the attic at Rochester’s estate, she learns much more, good and bad, about her family and the people she loves. Jane Eyre has become an iconic novel, sparking many sequels, revisions, screen and stage versions. Moïse writes hers with a delicate 19th-century sensibility that serves her characters well. They thrive under the author’s care, much like the herb gardens under Adele’s green thumb. Even as she tackles tough subjects of the times, like the clash between the religious view of how life began and the newfangled theories of evolution, the writing is entertaining and deft. Readers will easily follow Moïse’s smooth transitions between the epistolary form and Adele’s first-person narrative, even with a multitude of characters from past and present to account for.
Authentic, exciting and well-researched.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-6026-4501-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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