An engaging, wholesome love story, best suited for fans of early-20th-century romances.
A historical novel follows a privileged young woman whose parents die suddenly, leaving her to find a husband on her own.
In her contribution to the Matchmaker Series, a collaborative project between multiple authors (12 books by 12 authors in 12 months, all including a common matchmaking character), Moore (Summer in New York Collection, 2016, etc.) introduces readers to a lovable heroine who encounters a difficult struggle. Nelle Thompson is approaching her 21st birthday in 1908 in New York City. Her parents haven’t yet found her a husband, but Nelle has such a satisfying relationship with her mother and father that she feels no urgency to create a new attachment. Everything changes when Nelle’s parents are killed unexpectedly. She is sent to the country to live with her nasty, miserly aunt and self-involved cousin. Nelle’s inheritance will not become available to her until her next birthday, and in the meantime, she is at the mercy of her parsimonious aunt. Nelle is ordered to repay every penny used at her aunt’s, down to the last cup of tea, once her trust fund becomes unencumbered. In this horrid environment, Nelle’s grief over her parents intensifies, leading to insomnia and other health problems. The only time Nelle feels like herself is in the company of Mathew Janson, who, sadly, is engaged to her frivolous cousin, Alice. At her wits’ end, Nelle happens upon a quiet apothecary shop in town and makes an immediate connection with the store’s proprietor, a mysterious Asian woman named Miss Pearl. With help from her new friend, Nelle finally begins to get her life in order and create a pathway toward her future. As Moore narrates the story from the alternating perspectives of Nelle and Mathew, readers should be caught up in the magical romanticism of the tale. At one point, Mathew muses that Nelle reminds him “of a china doll in a shop’s window display…sweet inside and out, not exactly blending in with the practical countryside.” The fast-paced book remains appealing even as it deals with difficult topics, ranging from death and depression to love and redemption. Moore tackles each issue with wisdom and grace. Despite the story’s somewhat predictable end, the characters are sufficiently fresh and unexpected that even discerning readers should be satisfied.
An engaging, wholesome love story, best suited for fans of early-20th-century romances.Pub Date: April 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-941145-67-8
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Mirror Press
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2016
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
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