Fun, romantic, and suited for both adult and teenage readers. On its way to PBS in January 2017.
The teenage Queen Victoria, raging against her mother, crushing on her prime minister, and not impressed by her loser cousin Albert.
Goodwin (The American Heiress, 2015, etc.) wrote this novel imagining the adolescence of the woman whose rule defined most of the 19th century just as her television script of the same story went into production in England; in her acknowledgments she thanks the actors and her daughter, a "teenage queen" herself. When the death of Victoria’s uncle, His Majesty William IV, puts her on the throne of England one month after her 18th birthday, she is legally in charge and ready to seize the reins of power, disappointing her mother and her adviser Sir John Conroy, who were counting on controlling her. Brushing them off like gnats, she announces, “For a start, I do not intend to stay here at Kensington. It is miles away from anything, and quite unsuitable as a royal residence.…I think I shall look over Buckingham House. It is in the centre of town, at least, and I believe it has a throne room.” Her plan to ditch her mother and Conroy out in the burbs is quickly shot down by her new best friend and adviser, Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, who explains that “if you leave your mother behind at Kensington, there will be talk of an unpleasant kind, and that would be a shame so early in your reign.” Soon hopelessly in love with the handsome older statesman she calls “Lord M,” the little queen hasn’t much more than a glance for the suitors vying for her attention. Then from Germany come two cousins from her mother’s side—blond “demigods” Ernst and Albert. “Such a prig” is her judgment on the latter—but readers who remember their history know that something’s gotta give.
Fun, romantic, and suited for both adult and teenage readers. On its way to PBS in January 2017.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-04546-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Touching and inspirational.
A scarf ties together the stories of two women as they struggle with personal journeys 100 years apart in Meissner’s historical novel (The Girl in the Glass, 2012, etc.).
In 1911, Clara Wood witnesses the traumatic death of the man she loves in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and chooses to bury her grief and guilt while ministering to sick immigrants on Ellis Island. The hospital’s remote and insulated from the rest of New York City, and she refuses travel to the mainland, even on her days off. Then an emigrant Welshman wrapped in his deceased wife’s distinctive marigold scarf arrives, and Clara finds herself reaching beyond her normal duties to help the quarantined man. The truths she uncovers about his wife trigger reflections about ethical decisions and compel her to examine her own convictions about life and a person’s capacity to love, as a colleague tries to help her. Gently interwoven into Clara’s tale is the story of widow Taryn Michaels, whose life 100 years later in some ways parallels Clara’s. Taryn works in a tony fabric shop, raises her daughter in the apartment above and does her best to avoid the overwhelming emotions she’s felt since she stood across the street from the World Trade Center and witnessed the destruction as the first tower crumbled. A recently discovered photo from that day is published in a national magazine and now, 10 years after 9/11, Taryn is forced to relive the events and face the guilt she’s harbored because she acceded to a customer’s request and stopped by a hotel to pick up a marigold scarf, an action that delayed Taryn from joining her husband at Windows on the World for a celebration she’d planned. Meissner is a practiced writer whose two main characters cope with universal themes that many people deal with: loss, survivor’s guilt, and permitting oneself to move on and achieve happiness again. Although their stories are unbalanced—Clara’s account dominates the narrative—the author creates two sympathetic, relatable characters that readers will applaud.
Touching and inspirational.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-451-41991-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: New American Library
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Better seen as a lengthy prose poem than a novel, this allusive, elusive little gem adds its own shadowy luster to the Nobel...
Abandonment, betrayal and loss are the somber themes of this latest exploration of America’s morally compromised history from Morrison (Love, 2003, etc.).
All the characters she sets down in the colonial landscape circa 1690 are bereft, none more evidently so than Florens, 16-year-old slave of Jacob Vaark and his wife Rebekka. Eight years earlier, Anglo-Dutch farmer and trader Jacob reluctantly took Florens in settlement of a debt from a Maryland landowner. Her own mother offered her—so as not to be traded with Florens’ infant brother, the girl thinks. (The searing final monologue reveals it was not so simple.) Florens joined a household of misfits somewhere in the North. Jacob was a poor orphan who came to America to make a new start; Rebekka’s parents essentially sold her to him to spare themselves her upkeep. The couple has shared love, but also sadness; all four of their offspring died in childhood. They take in others similarly devastated. Lina, raped by a “Europe,” has been cast out by her Native American tribe. Mixed-race Sorrow survived a shipwreck only to be made pregnant by her rescuer, who handed her over to Jacob. Willard and Scully are indentured servants, farmed out to labor for Jacob by their contract holders, who keep fraudulently extending their time. Only the free African blacksmith who helps Jacob construct his fancy new house—and who catches Florens’ love-starved eye—seems whole and self-sufficient, though he eventually falls prey to Florens’ raging fear of abandonment. Morrison’s point, made in a variety of often-melodramatic plot developments, is that America was founded on the involuntary servitude of blacks and whites, that the colonies are rife with people who belong nowhere else and anxiously strive to find something to hold onto in the New World. Gorgeous language and powerful understanding of the darkest regions in the human heart compensate for the slightly schematic nature of the characters and the plot.
Better seen as a lengthy prose poem than a novel, this allusive, elusive little gem adds its own shadowy luster to the Nobel laureate’s shimmering body of work.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-26423-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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