In a disappointing third novel, the bestselling author of Big Girls Don—t Cry (1996), etc., draws on her family’s history in a story about slavery, miscegenation, and the Civil War. The aim is worthy, but Briscoe never follows through on events or fully explores her characters, who remain curiously sealed off from one another and the times they live in. The story begins in the last years of James Madison’s life, out of office and living at Montpelier, where house-slave Susan works as a housekeeper, aided by ten-year old daughter Clara. As she grows up, Clara describes her increasing anger with whites and her hatred of slavery. Following Madison’s death, Dolley Madison’s wastrel son Todd, deeply in debt, sells many of the slaves as well as Montpelier. Clara stays on under the succession of white masters, one of whom fathers her two daughters, Ellen and Susan (the author’s great-great grandmother) who are fair enough to pass as white. Curiously, Clara never explains the circumstances or names the man. When yet another master takes over, daughter Susan is sold to a Mr. Willard, a rich banker in Richmond whom Susan recognizes as the white man who gave her pennies when she was a child. She also looks like his daughters, Lizbeth and Ellen, but nothing is said or thought about this curious circumstance. As Susan becomes part of the household, looking after Lizbeth’s children and falling in love with freed slave Oliver Armistead, the Civil War begins. Susan and Oliver marry, but he’s taken away to man the defenses of Richmond and she must live with the Willard family, which continues to be self-absorbed and terminally stupid. Even when the War ends, they don’t seem to grasp its implications, but Susan, realizing now that she’s free, is reunited with Oliver and heads to the Tidewater to make a new home and life. Heartfelt, but a thin and unsatisfying take on a weighty and still urgent subject. (First printing of 150,000, $350,000 ad/promo, author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-017278-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
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