Setterfield’s debut is enchanting Goth for the 21st century.
A dying writer bids a young bookshop assistant to write her biography.
Margaret Lea grew up in a household of mourning, but she never knew why until the day she opened a box of papers underneath her parent’s bed and found the birth and death certificates of a twin sister of whom she never knew. It is the coincidence of twins in the life of Vida Winter, Britain’s most famous writer, that convinces Margaret to leave her post at her father’s rare-books store and travel to the dying writer’s Yorkshire estate. There, she hears a story no one else knows: who Vida Winter really is. For decades, the author has wildly fabricated answers to personal questions in interviews. Now Vida wants to tell the true story. And what a story it is, replete with madness; incest; a pair of twins who speak a private language; a devastating fire; a ghost that opens doors and closes books; a baby abandoned on a doorstep in the rain; a page torn from a turn-of-the-century edition of Jane Eyre; a cake-baking gentle giant; skeletons; topiaries; blind housekeepers; and suicide. As the master storyteller nears death, Margaret has yet to understand why she is the one Vida chose to record her tale. And is it a tall tale? One last great fiction to leave for her reading public? Only Margaret, who begins to catch glimpses of her own dead twin in the eternal gloom of the Winter estate, can sort truth from longing and lies from guilt. Setterfield has crafted an homage to the romantic heroines of du Maurier, Collins and the Brontës. But this is no postmodern revision of the genre. It is a contemporary gothic tale whose excesses and occasional implausibility (Vida’s “brother” is the least convincing character) can be forgiven for the thrill of the storytelling.
Setterfield’s debut is enchanting Goth for the 21st century.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-9802-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A shapeless but often engrossing period melodrama.
All’s fair in love and war in this sprawling epic about a family weathering the Civil War.
When the conflict begins, the Gordon family–prosperous hog farmers in the Missouri Ozarks–figure they’ll sit it out. But then them Yankee devils descend on Ripley County at the behest of “St. Louis bosses,” murdering, pillaging, burning and raping as they go. “ ‘Would you think there’s men so utterly evil as to shoot up a church meeting?’ ” wonders a shell-shocked survivor. “ ‘Nobody but a bunch of damn Yankees would do a thing like that.’ ” To defend their farms and womenfolk, Gordon sons Stuart and Riley join up with Confederate partisans, but the fighting takes a distant backseat to the clan’s romantic entanglements. The battles occur in fleeting background paragraphs amidst the main business of flirting and bickering, dances and socials, endless strategizing about how to approach a girl or catch a man and a constant routine of childcare and kitchen chores. Stuart is torn between town whore Sue Ellen and haughty beauty Lorena, whose sister Millie sets her cap for Riley. Meanwhile, the Gordon sisters suffer heartbreak at the hands of handsome, no-account cads: Kate pines for–and dreads–the return of the charming snake of a husband who abandoned her, while Emely weakly fends off the seductive advances of a local heartthrob. The story is marred by its naive pro-Confederate politics and a bloated, meandering narrative, but Webb (The Judge’s Daughter, 2004) paints a convincing and detailed–if somewhat glamorized–portrait of rural Southern life in the Civil War era.
A shapeless but often engrossing period melodrama.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-59526-363-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Slim pickings from the turn-of-the-century North Carolina tobacco industry, by the author of Scarlett (not reviewed) and a slew of other Southern-fried fiction (New Orleans Legacy, 1987, etc.). Nate Richardson is a virile and promiscuous 18-year-old tobacco farmer who falls in lust with Lily Gaskins, the coquette who marries his preacher brother, Gideon. The newlyweds move far away, enabling Nate to focus on his big plan to take over the burgeoning cigarette industry. A crucial part of his project involves wresting the patent for a revolutionary new cigarette- rolling machine from its doddering inventor, but the machine's price tag is high: Nate must marry the inventor's granddaughter, Francesca (Chess) Standish, and promise to give her children. Chess's head for books and figures serves charming front-man Nate well; the two are happy as partners, and business takes off. Nate's tobacco is the most golden and the tastiest; the machine he builds is better than that of the competition. His family quickly goes from picking worms off tobacco leaves to selecting fine clothing and furnishings for their nouveau-riche mansions. Although she loves him, Chess and Nate both remain dissatisfied with their sex life, which comes and goes in quick, cold spurts. Nate keeps mistresses, including Lily. Chess raises their daughter and doesn't know what she's missing until she meets her cousin Lord Randall Standish on a trip to London. Nate, busy selling cigarettes to the Brits, doesn't notice that Chess falls rapturously into the lord's arms, where she learns the pleasures of the flesh. Returning to America, they learn that Lily's next child may be Nate's and that Lord Randall wants Chess back; the couple must decide whether to dissolve the partnership or fall in love. Unfortunately, Ripley provides little conflict, no subplots, and holds off on the steamy scenes until much too late in the book. A paperback original spilling out of its hardcover corset.
Pub Date: Nov. 25, 1994
ISBN: 0-446-51406-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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