Winning first installment in a planned series, sure to be loved by fans of both mysteries and historical fiction.
A Separatist healer is determined to identify a killer, even if it places her under suspicion for incompetence—or even murder—in Sullivan’s (Deadly Diversion, 2009, etc.) historical mystery.
In the strict religious community of Zoar, Ohio, healer and midwife Adelaide Bechtmann is already flirting with disapproval when she goes to her favorite riverside spot to meditate. Instead of finding peace, she discovers the body of 16-year-old Johanna Appelgate floating in the river. When she pulls Johanna out of the water, Adelaide knows the young woman couldn’t have drowned, due to the absence of water in her lungs. The Separatists are all too willing to dismiss Johanna's death as a tragic accident, so Adelaide’s attempts to find her killer ignite controversy in the closed community. Even her beloved husband, Benjamin, fearing the loss of their comfortable life, refuses to support his wife’s investigation. Adelaide’s knowledge that the young woman was pregnant complicates the situation, and she’s anxious that the “remedy” she prescribed may have contributed to Johanna’s demise. Adelaide struggles to preserve the reputation of the deceased girl, even as her own deteriorates, and she can’t help but remember her husband’s closeness to Johanna. The conflicts between homeopathy and traditional medicine, marriage and celibacy and the eternal struggle for power among the male Separatists are all interwoven in the finely drawn murder mystery. Award-winning Sullivan brings the Zoar community to life, imbuing both real and fictional characters with laudable qualities as well as flaws, although antagonists Simon, Martin and Gerda are unrelentingly unsympathetic. While enough background information on the Separatists is provided to prevent reader confusion, Sullivan is a little stingy with her backstory, hinting at Adelaide’s prior tragic error without ever fully explaining it. Sullivan’s otherwise expertly crafted, perfectly paced novel suffers from comparatively underdeveloped relationships between Adelaide and those presumably closest to her—her husband Benjamin and sister Nellie.
Winning first installment in a planned series, sure to be loved by fans of both mysteries and historical fiction.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1936214556
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Yesteryear Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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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