An unusual historical novel not soon forgotten.
Two outsiders and a monstrous dictator deal with tumultuous world events.
Beginning with the oft-rumored escape and survival of Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia, this novel twists and turns through some of the most significant historical events of the 20th century. Under the watchful eye of the sympathetic Count Carl Zurofsky, the girl, now known only as Anna, grows up in Romania. All the while, her country and birthright face upheaval and strife as history takes its course through world war, revolution, advancement, and tyranny. Both Anna and Carl are point-of-view characters, offering perspectives as outsiders, victims, and recipients of dramatic legacies. In fact, Carl’s family descends from Count Dracula, a history that stains him even as it inspires him to do good from the shadows. But since both Anna and Carl are somewhat removed from the centers of power they might otherwise occupy, the novel offers readers the perspective of none other than Stalin himself as he shapes history and is shaped by it in turn. The industrial backdrop of Russia’s five-year plans stands in stark contrast to the wild, pastoral beauty of Anna’s new surroundings. At the same time, her discovery of love and forgiveness is vastly different from Stalin’s struggles with power, corruption, and the fragile nonaggression pact he strikes with Germany on the eve of World War II. Logan (Time Is of the Essence, 2008, etc.) approaches this historical novel with a surprising poetic flair. The character perspectives switch back and forth frequently, although the engrossing narration does sometimes linger on one setting over the other when history demands a longer, more thorough treatment of a particular time or event. Meanwhile, the prose is flexible, readily shifting between traditional, effective dialogue and more verselike descriptions, making reading it a new experience. Fans of historical fiction may find the novel’s creative liberties a little fanciful or its short length insufficient to convey the temporal details common to the genre. But if readers keep an open mind, they’ll be treated to a lyrical, character-focused journey into events and figures rarely humanized in fiction.
An unusual historical novel not soon forgotten.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4917-5094-0
Page Count: 196
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
