A flawed but exciting, fast-paced, and intriguing adventure.
After escaping from an abusive British orphanage, two friends travel, face danger, and learn of a deep conspiracy in this debut middle-grade novel.
Although it’s the 21st century, the Weatherly orphanage in Yorkshire, England, run by Mr. and Mrs. Grievous, resembles an institution straight out of Dickens. The orphans are worked hard all day to make sellable items; they get little food, wear tattered clothing, and receive harsh punishments. Twelve-year-old Tom came to Weatherly six years ago, having lived in a string of orphanages since he was a child. He’s close friends with Sarah Wallace, also 12, who’s been orphaned for two years. It’s time to escape, Tom figures, especially when Mr. Grievous taunts him with the information that his parents are still alive. Tom and Sarah make a risky breakout, but on their trail is Detective Arthur Gowerstone, a legendary finder of runaway orphans. Tom and Sarah evade him by stealing a hot air balloon. In Oxford, they meet a friendly professor who guides them to Windsor Castle, where he believes the butler, a former student, will help. But Tom and Sarah soon run straight into a conspiracy carried out at the highest levels that involves the royal succession; nowhere in England is safe. In this series opener, Stewart offers nearly nonstop action, with escapades both perilous and amusing, and exhilarating hairsbreadth escapes. The conspiracy is bold and compelling while the plot folds in intriguing facts about British culture, history, and famous sites. Verisimilitude falters, though; for example, orphanages no longer exist in Britain. And if the orphans never go to school, how do they learn to read the books that are their only pleasure? Another bar to enjoyment is an overabundance of adverbs, which call too much attention to themselves (“whispered enthusiastically”; “replied nonchalantly”; “added earnestly”; “said graciously”; “added philosophically”). Another problem is some underlying sexism; Tom is usually the active partner while Sarah tends to fall down and need rescuing or comforting.
A flawed but exciting, fast-paced, and intriguing adventure.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73296-120-3
Page Count: 394
Publisher: Devonfield Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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