A rich and engaging account of particular lives amid history and great change, narrated with real grace by a master...
A fanciful family saga by English author Joyce (Smoking Poppy, 2002, etc.) depicts one of the most eccentric British households since the Mitfords.
With daughters outnumbering sons 7-0, the Vine family is intensely matriarchal—and the fact that Mr. Vine rarely speaks to anyone at home (including his wife) only makes it the more so. Vine’s wife Martha is the heart and soul of the family, a fiercely practical woman who runs her house like a well-organized battleship and brooks no mutiny from any of her crew. But there is an unexpected side to Martha Vine, who is secretly given to occasional visions and prophecies and can sometimes foresee the future. Of all her daughters, only the youngest, Cassie, has inherited Martha’s gift, and Cassie passes it on in turn to her son Frank, conceived in an ill-advised one-nighter with an American GI. Considered unstable by her more level-headed sisters, Cassie is occasionally confined to mental hospitals, but at Martha’s command she’s given shelter by each of the six sisters in turn. As a result, young Frank enjoys a peripatetic childhood, growing up in environments as varied as his aunt Una’s Warwickshire farm and his aunt Beatrice’s Oxford commune. Although none of Frank’s aunts is as unconventional as his own mother, they’re an unusual lot overall, ranging from spiritualist spinsters to free-love Communists, making Frank’s upbringing a good deal more cosmopolitan than that of the average working-class English boy of his era. His story is intertwined with those of his aunts and his grandmother and mother—and of his ruined hometown of Coventry, destroyed during the war but gradually built anew in the 1950s. In Joyce’s telling, it all becomes a portrait of England at large, at once traditional and irreverent, badly worn out by war but determined to start life over again.
A rich and engaging account of particular lives amid history and great change, narrated with real grace by a master storyteller.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-6342-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© 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.
