Whereas Austen was preoccupied with subtle digs at mores and manners, McCullough (Antony and Cleopatra, 2007, etc.) bursts...
In McCullough’s sensational sequel to Pride and Prejudice, wallflower sister Mary Bennet sheds her cocoon, as Elizabeth and Darcy contemplate divorce.
Mary, dismissed by her family as plain, has been for two decades designated caregiver to scatterbrained Mrs. Bennet, who passes on while awaiting tea. Twenty years after Elizabeth Bennet married Fitzwilliam Darcy, their marriage is threatened by sexual dysfunction on both sides. Darcy’s disappointed in his heir, Charles, thanks to vicious rumors spread by his jilted ex, Caroline Bingley, that the too-handsome Oxford scholar is light in the loafers. Slatternly sister-in-law Lydia, a hopeless drunk, has turned up at the Darcy country seat, Pemberley, to spew swoon-inducing profanity. Mary, now lovely thanks to cosmetic interventions by Lizzy’s pharmacist and dentist, but driven by her spinster’s crush on anonymous newspaper correspondent Argus, embarks on a quest to expose the outrages perpetrated upon England’s poor. Argus is really Darcy’s friend Angus, wealthy Scottish publisher of the Westminster Chronicle. Enchanted by Mary, this 40-ish bachelor dares not propose to the skittish bluestocking. Mary journeys across England by stagecoach, no way for a gentlewoman to travel, and encounters situations unimaginable or at least indescribable by Austen. She’s pawed by ruffians, waylaid by a highwayman named Captain Thunder and kidnapped by the “Children of Jesus,” a cave-dwelling congregation of abandoned children led by a renegade alchemist named Father Dominus. Angus, Darcy and Charles, who’s manning up, search for Mary. Darcy’s devoted fixer and factotum Ned is also on Mary’s trail, along which he’s surreptitiously strewn several corpses. Mary, the titular heroine, is still, despite her makeover, too bland to be interesting. The attention-grabbers are Lizzy, whose sarcasm has begun to pall on Darcy, incorrigible harpy Caroline and, unexpectedly, self-appointed avenging angel Ned, who could anchor his own Georgian-era noir novel.
Whereas Austen was preoccupied with subtle digs at mores and manners, McCullough (Antony and Cleopatra, 2007, etc.) bursts from the drawing room to paint Austen’s milieu in lurid colors.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9648-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
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
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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