An ambitious, touching tale of a Granadian’s cruel coming-of-age.
A young woman in 1513 struggles to survive when the Spanish Inquisition reaches her hometown of Granada in Cotton’s (Barbarossa's Barb, 2017) Renaissance romance.
Seventeen-year-old Eva de Pazia’s life is full of secrets. Her father, Iago, tells her that her extra toe, a birth defect, proves her mother’s adultery with the devil; years of his abuse have left Eva terrified of men and marriage. Her closest companions in her unhappy home are her older brother, Elias, and her polydactyl cat, Tabita. A devout Christian who longs to enter a convent, Eva discovers that her once-Jewish father’s conversion wasn’t sincere. When the Inquisition comes to town, Eva turns her father in, believing that he’ll only be fined and exposed; instead, the Inquisitors seize her family’s home and assets, burn her father at the stake, accuse her brother of witchcraft, and give Eva to Moorish merchant Baltasar Cerra. Cerra forces her to live with his majordomo, the smallpox-scarred Baseel Alcazar, as his mistress—but Baseel never touches her. Instead, the two begin an uneasy friendship, playing music together on their guitarras and discussing religion; as Eva schemes to escape, she realizes that she may be falling in love. Cotton’s book is rich in detail, full of the food, furnishings, fashions, and faiths of the multiethnic milieu of 16th-century Granada, where many Christian “converts” continued to practice Judaism or Islam behind closed doors. The narration occasionally shifts to Tabita’s point of view, and its feline musings provide an often funny perspective on events—it’s sure that producing a “human kitten” will cheer Eva up, for instance, and it’s often confused by its mistress’s lack of interest in men. The frequent flashbacks are framed by sometimes-creaky segues: “She remembered the day she had been given Tabita—a day she would never forget”; “Eva was pulled back into the present.” For the most part, however, Eva’s plight and inner torment are compelling as she learns the truth about her family, herself, and her world.
An ambitious, touching tale of a Granadian’s cruel coming-of-age.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9787281-5-1
Page Count: 428
Publisher: Renaissance Re-imprints
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A rollicking first novel from British journalist Hornby that manages to make antic hay of a young (barely) man's hopeless resolve not to come of age. Rob Fleming is the sort of precocious loser whose life has gone so unaccountably wrong that some deep romantic grief must be invoked to explain it. ``The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking,'' according to Rob, ``are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives.'' As a case in point, the 35-year-old Rob not only listens to these songs himself but peddles themas the founder and proprietor of Championship Vinyl, a seedy vintage-record store in a quiet back alley of North London. Business is hardly booming these days, and the shop would have gone under long ago but for Rob's lawyer- girlfriend Laura, who has propped it up time and again with cash from her own very ample pool. Once she dumps Rob, however, everything is suddenly on the verge of collapsefiscally and emotionallyand Rob is forced to ask himself how he landed in such a mess. Naturally, he has no idea, so he proceeds to look up his ex-girlfriendsall the way back to high schooland ask them why things never worked out. As a pilgrimage, Rob's quest bears more resemblance to Monty Python than Chaucer, and his own inability to put two and two together somehow endears him to the very women whose affections he seems least able to requite. Reality bludgeons him in the end, and he succeeds, as the plot is spun, in drawing a few morals that surprise him by their simplicity and point toward a happy endingor at least a second chance. Fast, fun, and remarkably deft: a sharp-edged portrait that manages at once to be vicious, generous, and utterly good-natured.
Pub Date: Sept. 5, 1995
ISBN: 1-57322-016-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A strange, subtle, and haunting novel.
A financier's Ponzi scheme unravels to disastrous effect, revealing the unexpected connections among a cast of disparate characters.
How did Vincent Smith fall overboard from a container ship near the coast of Mauritania, fathoms away from her former life as Jonathan Alkaitis' pretend trophy wife? In this long-anticipated follow-up to Station Eleven (2014), Mandel uses Vincent's disappearance to pick through the wreckage of Alkaitis' fraudulent investment scheme, which ripples through hundreds of lives. There's Paul, Vincent's half brother, a composer and addict in recovery; Olivia, an octogenarian painter who invested her retirement savings in Alkaitis' funds; Leon, a former consultant for a shipping company; and a chorus of office workers who enabled Alkaitis and are terrified of facing the consequences. Slowly, Mandel reveals how her characters struggle to align their stations in life with their visions for what they could be. For Vincent, the promise of transformation comes when she's offered a stint with Alkaitis in "the kingdom of money." Here, the rules of reality are different and time expands, allowing her to pursue video art others find pointless. For Alkaitis, reality itself is too much to bear. In his jail cell, he is confronted by the ghosts of his victims and escapes into "the counterlife," a soothing alternate reality in which he avoided punishment. It's in these dreamy sections that Mandel's ideas about guilt and responsibility, wealth and comfort, the real and the imagined, begin to cohere. At its heart, this is a ghost story in which every boundary is blurred, from the moral to the physical. How far will Alkaitis go to deny responsibility for his actions? And how quickly will his wealth corrupt the ambitions of those in proximity to it? In luminous prose, Mandel shows how easy it is to become caught in a web of unintended consequences and how disastrous it can be when such fragile bonds shatter under pressure.
A strange, subtle, and haunting novel.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-52114-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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