A cloying fable better suited for a bedtime story.
The fictional tale of a young woman who attains her childhood dream of becoming a queen.
Debut novelist Buckley depicts the imaginary country of Molgravia as one whose citizens value resilience and determination. Nona, the only child of Vlok, an entrepreneurial count, and Henrietta, a somewhat self-absorbed but loving mother, internalizes these ideals from a young age. Raised in comfort, she delights in being cast as queen in her school play. When she tells her parents of her desire to someday become a real queen who has the power to help people, they tell her it’s unlikely since they’re not of royal lineage or of the highest economic class. Nona matures into a beautiful, intelligent young woman who attracts two serious suitors, neither of whom entirely captures her heart. Upon attending a royal wedding in her country’s capital, she meets a charming foreigner, Wolfgang, the king of Gavia—a fact unbeknownst to her until later that weekend. They begin an enduring romance and eventually wed. While Nona wins over the hearts of the Gavian people, she inwardly despairs over her futile attempts to become pregnant. As she sinks deeper into depression, another country attacks Gavia, forcing it to go to war. Nona summons her faith and positivity, and in just a few days, the enemies withdraw and peace returns. Soon after, she becomes pregnant and overflows with optimism: “There is no obstacle on your way you can’t overcome, no situation out of which there might be no solution.” Nona may be cheerful, but her frequent saccharine soliloquies border on self-righteousness and paint her as more of a caricature than a realistic character. The narrative as a whole is rife with moralistic aphorisms yet short on dialogue, plot development and suspense. Copy editing glitches also detract from the writing. Nevertheless, Buckley paints an absorbing account of the cultural norms and seasonal rhythms of life in Nona’s village. Molgravia comes alive in what appears to be Europe of yesteryear, although this seemingly old-fashioned tale occasionally invokes more modern sensibilities through its call for gender equality.
A cloying fable better suited for a bedtime story.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0646570853
Page Count: 186
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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