A well-researched rags-to-riches tale that’s told with confidence and enthusiasm.
Burton’s debut historical novel, the first in a series about the Byzantine Empress Theodora, charts her journey from destitution to the throne.
The novel opens in Constantinople in the year 512. A rebellion is brewing in the city, and 14-year-old Theodora, along with her sister, Comito, is searching for their father, a bear-keeper named Acacius. The following morning, the siblings tragically discover that he has been killed in the unrest. Magister Origen, a local judge, suggests that their mother, Maximina, marry Samuel, a candidate for the bear-keeper post, in order to keep the profession in her family. Maximina agrees to this course of action, but she puts her foot down when the magistrate also recommends that both of her daughters be sent to dance school, where they’ll learn how to entertain men as actresses—and as courtesans. Despite her mother’s protests, Theodora agrees to attend the school, declaring that she wants to be “on stage for all to see. Someone beautiful and important.” Theodora goes on to fall in love with the Hippodrome and theater life in general. This idyllic existence ends, however, when Magister Origen rapes her, and one night, she slashes him with a knife and flees for home. The magistrate then withdraws financial support for the family, and soon they face dire poverty. Their savior comes in the form of a handsome Roman officer who’s later revealed to be an important figure. He asks 19-year-old Theodora to work for him as a spy to get information from various men in power, by whatever means necessary. However, she later finds that she’s falling deeply in love with her new employer. Over the course of this novel, Burton offers an elegantly written historical tale in which he effortlessly weaves sweeping emotion and fine detail into compact sentences: “Maximina pulled her daughters in closer, forming a protective embrace. Theodora saw how the white gowns spilled down like milk upon the dark brown of the track, her mother rising above.” He also smoothly supplies accurate historical details as the story goes on, as when the aforementioned Roman officer gently corrects Theodora regarding the identity and occupation of his powerful adoptive father: “But yes, he’s Count of the Excubitors.” However, the author also sometimes offers occasional moments of physical description that can be a bit off-putting, as when he notes that “Theodora rubbed her teeth against her bottom lip.” British author Stella Duffy’s 2010 novel Theodora, which deals with the same main character, is far more brazen in its depictions of sex scenes than Burton’s is, although some readers will likely prefer the latter’s relatively genteel approach, which mostly veers away from sensationalism and focuses more on characterization. Theodora, in particular, is revealed to be a charming and strong-willed yet emotionally conflicted young woman, and she engagingly endeavors to exert her influence in a male-dominated society. The overall storyline is generally strong and compelling, and the writing is, for the most part, sharp and learned.
A well-researched rags-to-riches tale that’s told with confidence and enthusiasm.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73302-210-1
Page Count: 394
Publisher: Silent Music Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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