An engaging, sometimes-wondrous work of historical fiction.
Kuri’s debut historical novel tells of a venture to control the fur trade in the Pacific Northwest.
Gabriel Franchère, 24, is a French Canadian from the St. Lawrence Valley, unique among the young men of his village for his ability to read and write. In 1810, he and some of his friends set out with a wilderness-hardened Scotsman and his team of voyageurs on a journey into unknown territories. First they travel to New York City, where their benefactor, immigrant visionary John Jacob Astor, dreams “to unite all the untouched lands of this continent under a single fur trading company of his own.” From New York, they set off on a grueling monthslong journey aboard the Tonquin, around Cape Horn and up to the mouth of the Columbia River, where the great untapped forests of Oregon offer riches for any man bold enough to brave them. An assemblage of adventurers, sailors, and businessmen—some famous, some infamous—surround Franchère as he navigates the streets of Manhattan, the high seas, and the wilds of the Northwest. Their enterprise is that of empire itself, and while it may be an undertaking conceived in the halls of power, it will be realized in blood and smoke at the edges of the known world. Kuri writes in steady, detail-oriented prose reminiscent of the labor that characterizes the world of his fiction: “The stout, elderly Huron, beside a rack of drying strips of meat, prepares a skin using a knife to remove pieces of fat from a wet and soft hide she has previously soaked in brine and staked out with the skin up, that it might dry smooth.” The present tense lends a documentary quality to the story, which banishes romanticism while still keeping readers enthralled in its rhythms. A great depth of research is apparent, and though readers may find that the minutiae stand in the way of a more traditional adventure tale, others will appreciate how deftly Kuri immerses us in a world of tremendous toil, danger, and beauty.
An engaging, sometimes-wondrous work of historical fiction.Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-98-626412-2
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Dragon Tree Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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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