Bitto adapts a leisurely storytelling pace that matches the period as she explores with quiet passion both the cost of...
A first novel from Australia about an artist and his wealthy wife living with their three daughters on the creative edge in hidebound 1930s Melbourne.
Narrator Lily is the 8-year-old only child of overprotective parents struggling their way through the Depression when she meets Eva Trentham and her two sisters, Bea and Heloise, at her new school. Entranced by Eva but also her glamorous mother, Helena, and painter father, Evan, who don’t mind flouting convention, Lily is soon spending as much time as she can at their estatelike home, which has belonged to Helena’s family for generations. Soon other young artists move in as the Trenthams experiment in creating a free-spirited bohemian utopia. Meanwhile Lily and Eva develop an intensely close friendship; author Bitto is particularly strong at portraying “the depth of intimacy in that first chaste trial marriage between girls.” Drawn to the atmosphere of “carefree detachment” in which Helena and Evan raise their children—Evan unselfconsciously naked much of the time, Helena paying erratic attention to basic needs like food on the table—Lily yearns to be part of the family, not just a friend or guest. But what seems Edenic to Lily becomes increasingly problematic for the Trentham daughters, particularly the youngest, Heloise, whose emotional struggles no one takes seriously until too late. The dangers of the Trentham's creative neglect come to fruition when the girls blossom into puberty in close proximity to attractive male artists in their 20s. From the first page, a middle-aged Lily lets the reader know “it all fell apart.” The novel is framed within Lily’s preparations to attend a 1985 museum retrospective of a now-revered Evan’s work, her visit to the now-elderly Trenthams, her first conversation with Eva since their relationship ruptured decades earlier, and her growing if conflicted desire to write a memoir about them all.
Bitto adapts a leisurely storytelling pace that matches the period as she explores with quiet passion both the cost of creative life on family and the definition of family itself.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4555-3772-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
A magnificent achievement: a novel that is, by turns, both optimistic and fatalistic, idealistic without being naïve.
Powers’ (Orfeo, 2014, etc.) 12th novel is a masterpiece of operatic proportions, involving nine central characters and more than half a century of American life.
In this work, Powers takes on the subject of nature, or our relationship to nature, as filtered through the lens of environmental activism, although at its heart the book is after more existential concerns. As is the case with much of Powers’ fiction, it takes shape slowly—first in a pastiche of narratives establishing the characters (a psychologist, an undergraduate who died briefly but was revived, a paraplegic computer game designer, a homeless vet), and then in the kaleidoscopic ways these individuals come together and break apart. “We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men,” Powers writes, quoting the naturalist John Muir. “In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.” The idea is important because what Powers means to explore is a sense of how we become who we are, individually and collectively, and our responsibility to the planet and to ourselves. Nick, for instance, continues a project begun by his grandfather to take repeated photographs of a single chestnut tree, “one a month for seventy-six years.” Pat, a visionary botanist, discovers how trees communicate with one another only to be discredited and then, a generation later, reaffirmed. What links the characters is survival—the survival of both trees and human beings. The bulk of the action unfolds during the timber wars of the late 1990s, as the characters coalesce on the Pacific coast to save old-growth sequoia from logging concerns. For Powers, however, political or environmental activism becomes a filter through which to consider the connectedness of all things—not only the human lives he portrays in often painfully intricate dimensions, but also the biosphere, both virtual and natural. “The world starts here,” Powers insists. “This is the merest beginning. Life can do anything. You have no idea.”
A magnificent achievement: a novel that is, by turns, both optimistic and fatalistic, idealistic without being naïve.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-63552-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
SEEN & HEARD
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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