Intelligent escapism that should please Brothers Grimm lovers more than Disney fans.
In her first novel, Blackwell keeps her retelling of "Sleeping Beauty" in the once-upon-a-time past but makes the standard version’s reliance on magic subservient to a more psychological/sociological interpretation.
When aged Elise overhears her granddaughter telling the popular legend about a sleeping princess brought back to life by a kiss, she feels compelled to tell the real events she witnessed 50 years earlier while a beloved servant of King Ranolf and Queen Lenore: Aware she was the bastard offspring of an unnamed father connected to the castle where her mother once worked as a seamstress, Elise arrived at court as a teenager. Although her quick rise to becoming personal attendant to Queen Lenore made her unpopular with other servants, Elise adored her work and the gentle queen. But all was not as copacetic as it at first seemed. Lenore’s inability to bear an heir was creating a political as well as a marital crisis. Ranolf was about to buckle to pressure to name his brutal brother Bowen as successor, when Lenore returned from a journey with Ranolf’s great-aunt Millicent and announced her pregnancy. Soon, Millicent and Ranolf were locked in a power struggle over influencing Lenore, and Elise found her own allegiance to the queen compromised. And after Princess Rose was born, stubborn Ranolf banished Millicent, who vowed to destroy Ranolf’s kingdom. Whether she possessed any special power was less important than the “distrust and fear” that gradually overtook Ranolf’s rule as Rose grew up. Equally devoted to Rose as to her mother, Elise also lived her own life, complete with an early love and a complicated marriage. By the time Rose was 17, Ranolf had won a pyrrhic victory in his war against his enemies, including his brother, and Lenore had drifted under the spell of a religious fanatic. Then the kingdom faced an even greater crisis and Elise was assigned to protect Rose at all costs, including complete isolation.
Intelligent escapism that should please Brothers Grimm lovers more than Disney fans.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-399-16623-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Amy Einhorn/Putnam
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
PROFILES
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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