An exciting royal adventure with a large cast.
In Schrader’s (The Last Crusader Kingdom, 2017, etc.) historical novel, the Ibelin family fights to protect their honor and their position against a tyrannical Holy Emperor in 13th-century Cyprus and the Middle East.
The handsome, recently knighted Sir Balian II of the House of Ibelin can’t please his father, John d’Ibelin, Lord of Beirut, who considers his eldest son and heir to be impulsive and decadent; moreover, his reputation as a lady’s man seems inescapable. His uncle, Philip, is baillie of Cyprus on behalf of the 7-year-old King Henry I, and he strives to keep the peace in the land. When Amaury Barlais, a bitter knight, nearly kills someone after accusing him of cheating in a joust, he becomes the Ibelin family’s enemy for life. In Sicily, Frederick II Hohenstaufen, the Holy Roman Emperor, weds the young Yolanda, queen of Jerusalem, for a political alliance, but when he doesn’t keep his word regarding royal succession, it sets off a terrible chain of events. The emperor also wants to win back the Holy Land from the Saracens, and he calls on his subjects to help him. This sprawling work is full of excitement, with plenty of jousts, sieges, and daring escapes. The story features a huge cast of characters, and it takes readers on adventures through Cyprus, Acre, Jaffa, and other locales; however, there are maps, family trees, and character descriptions at the beginning that will help wayward readers. The well-meaning but flawed Sir Balian is a great central figure—a bit like William Shakespeare’s portrayal of the young Prince Hal, without being too clever for his (and his people’s) own good. The leading female characters, meanwhile, aren’t blushing maidens waiting to be rescued but rather forceful actors in their own rights.
An exciting royal adventure with a large cast.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62787-624-7
Page Count: 454
Publisher: Wheatmark
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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
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