In Denker's popular novels (To Marcy, With Love, 1996, etc.), where bad things happen to good-to-saintly people, there's often a dollop of medical matter; here, in the story of a widow and mother confronting AIDS, there's a good deal of powerful information concerning the disease. Grace Cameron, widowed at 32 when her hemophiliac husband died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage, supports herself and her 12-year-old daughter Kathy by operating a small calligraphy and gift-wrapping shop. On a routine doctor visit, though, she learns that she has AIDS, undoubtedly from a tainted blood transfusion given her husband in the past. She breaks the news to Kathy, and together the two weather the waves of fear and hope, anger and despair. As the disease progresses, Grace also realizes that she must find a home for Kathy, and she begins desperately to search for someone caring. There's wealthy, elderly—and bossy—Uncle Harry, eager to help but also eager to dictate Kathy's future. There is Aunt Hortense, who fears upsetting her childless marriage, as well as Aunt Louise, compulsively interfering and driven. Then there are the loving parents of Kathy's best friend—but does that marriage mask some hidden problem? Meantime, visits to the doctors proceed, and lab reports tell a chilling story. Kathy, grieving and obsessed, reads everything she can find about AIDS, learning the significance of the "branched DNA" test that reveals the status of the body's protective cells and that of the virus, and despairingly tracks the course of her mother's struggle. The haunting question of how long? is answered; Grace and Kathy celebrate Kathy's 13th birthday; and as the end approaches, Kathy herself will choose a home. Denker's people are inoffensive outlines, but the author's clear and convincing explanation of the nature and treatment of AIDS carries a natural impact. Sad stuff in a thin telling.
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-688-14963-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1997
It's all quite entertaining and memorable.
Here, Follett sets the thrillers aside for a long, steady story about building a cathedral in 12th-century England.
Bloodthirsty or adventure-crazed Follett readers will be frustrated, but anyone who has ever been moved by the splendors of a fine church will sink right into this highly detailed but fast-moving historical work—a novel about the people and skills needed to put up an eye-popping cathedral in the very unsettled days just before the ascension of Henry II. The cathedral is the brainchild of Philip, prior of the monastery at Kingsbridge, and Tom, an itinerant master mason. Philip, shrewd and ambitious but genuinely devout, sees it as a sign of divine agreement when his decrepit old cathedral burns on the night that Tom and his starving family show up seeking shelter. Actually, it's Tom's clever stepson Jack who has stepped in to carry out God's will by secretly torching the cathedral attic, but the effect is the same. Tom gets the commission to start the rebuilding—which is what he has wanted to do more than anything in his life. Meanwhile, however, the work is complicated greatly by local politics. There is a loathsome baron and his family who have usurped the local earldom and allied themselves with the powerful, cynical bishop—who is himself sinfully jealous of Philip's cathedral. There are the dispossessed heirs to earldom, a beautiful girl and her bellicose brother, both sworn to root out the usurpers. And there is the mysterious Ellen, Tom's second wife, who witnessed an ancient treachery that haunts the bishop, the priory, and the vile would-be earl. The great work is set back, and Tom is killed in a raid by the rivals. It falls to young Jack to finish the work. Thriller writing turns out to be pretty good training, since Follett's history moves like a fast freight train. Details are plenty, but they support rather than smother.
It's all quite entertaining and memorable.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1989
ISBN: 0451225244
Page Count: 973
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1989
BOOK TO SCREEN
Nobody writing today surpasses the precocious Waters’s virtuosic handling of narrative complexity and thickly textured...
Imagine a university-educated lesbian Charles Dickens with a similarly keen eye for mendacity and melodrama, and you’ll have some idea of the pleasures lurking in Waters’s impudent revisionist historicals: Tipping the Velvet (1999), Affinity (2000), and now this richly woven tale of duplicity, passion, and lots of other good stuff.
It begins as the narrative of 17-year-old Susan Trinder, an orphan resident of the criminal domicile run by Hogarthian Grace Sucksby, a Fagin-like “farmer” of discarded infants and den-mother to an extended family of “fingersmiths” (i.e., pickpockets) and assorted confidence-persons. One of the latter, Richard Rivers (a.k.a. “Gentleman”), engages Susan in an elaborate plot to fleece wealthy old Mr. Lilly, a connoisseur of rare books—as lady’s maid “Susan Smith” to Lilly’s niece and ward Maude, a “simple, natural” innocent who will be married off to “Mr. Rivers,” then disposed of in a madhouse, while the conspirators share her wealth. Maidservant and mistress grow unexpectedly close, until Gentleman’s real plan—a surprise no reader will see coming—leads to a retelling of events we’ve just witnessed, from a second viewpoint—which reveals the truth about Mr. Lilly’s bibliomania, and discloses to a second heroine that “Your life was not the life that you were meant to live.” (Misdirections and reversals are essential components of Waters’s brilliant plot, which must not be given away.) Further intrigues, escapes, and revelations climax when Susan (who has resumed her place as narrator) returns from her bizarre ordeal to Mrs. Sucksby’s welcoming den of iniquity, and a final twist of the knife precipitates another crime and its punishment, astonishing discoveries about both Maude and Susan (among others), and a muted reconciliation scene that ingeniously reshapes the conclusion of Dickens’s Great Expectations.
Nobody writing today surpasses the precocious Waters’s virtuosic handling of narrative complexity and thickly textured period detail. This is a marvelous novel.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2002
ISBN: 1-57322-203-8
Page Count: 493
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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