Less a novel than a 400-plus-page prologue to an anticipated sequel.
Young Catherine the Great, as observed by a palace mole.
Varvara, daughter of a Polish bookbinder, is fortunate, after being orphaned at an early age, to be hired to serve Empress Elizabeth of Russia as a seamstress. Bestuzhev, Chancellor of Russia, soon sees the makings of an excellent spy in the comely young woman. He undertakes her training, and soon she’s ingratiating herself with the Empress and reporting on every tantrum and foible. Catherine, daughter of impoverished Prussian nobles, is brought to Russia to marry Elizabeth’s nephew Peter, the Crown Prince. Varvara and Catherine soon bond, as Catherine’s meddling mother angers the Empress and almost scuttles the betrothal. Once married to Peter, Catherine’s position at court remains precarious—her husband seems more interested in playing soldier than fathering the new heir Elizabeth longs for. Varvara’s loyalty to Catherine antagonizes Bestuzhev, who despises Germans in general and Catherine in particular. Bestuzhev effectively banishes Varvara, arranging her marriage to Egor, an officer of the Palace Guard. Meanwhile Catherine and Peter are consigned to a remote castle in hopes that, deprived of distractions, they will mate. Catherine does produce a son, Paul, in all likelihood fathered by her lover, Saltykov. Elizabeth immediately appropriates Paul, who as he grows becomes a stranger to his mother. Catherine takes another lover, and Varvara is recalled to court by Bestuzhev as he envisions Catherine succeeding Elizabeth instead of Peter (just as Elizabeth herself usurped the throne from other heirs). War with Prussia takes Egor to the front, and as construction on the Empress’ Winter Palace proceeds at a glacial pace, the court waits to see how, and to whom, the balance of power will shift. All this watchful waiting saps the novel of drama. Historically brilliant and erudite, Catherine comes off as a passive and needy whiner, dependent on others to mediate for her. Varvara is such a covert operator that her personality never emerges.
Less a novel than a 400-plus-page prologue to an anticipated sequel.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-553-80812-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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