A curious, intriguing effort to retell a classic through the eyes of an iconic character, but several unanswered questions...
A unique twist on a time-honored tale that interweaves several literary characters.
Writing under the pen name of the “Holy Ghost Writer,” the author retells Alexandre Dumas’ well-known story from 1844. This time, however, the saga is told from the perspective of Sherlock Holmes. With right-hand man and chronicler Dr. Watson by his side, he regales Watson with this adventure for “literary posterity.” But it’s not all tied up in a nice little bow. Holmes chronicles Dumas’ story about Edmond Dantes, who starts off young, idealistic and happy before his life takes a drastic turn for the worse when he’s wrongly accused of a crime and serves years in prison as a result. Over time, his idealism fades and is replaced with a desire for revenge as he witnesses the limitations of the criminal justice system. He befriends a man in prison who ultimately dies and leaves Dantes with his fortune. Once free, Dantes sets out to punish the enemies responsible for his misfortune, taking on the guise of the wealthy and mysterious Count of Monte Cristo. Readers reunite with the detective and his companion in brief interludes throughout the book, as the two break to marvel at the adventure or sit down for a meal. The tale touches on many themes—justice, vengeance, hope, forgiveness—but it’s not clear why this story is being retold; perhaps the planned sequels will explain. In addition, the dialogue often feels forced and unrealistic. For instance, when Holmes promises to tell the story of the Sultan of Albania, Watson declares: “Absolutely wonderful….I really cannot wait to hear and record every detail....I am dying to find out what happens to my favorite characters, especially the world’s most elusive personality.”
A curious, intriguing effort to retell a classic through the eyes of an iconic character, but several unanswered questions remain.Pub Date: July 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1490927305
Page Count: 566
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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SEEN & HEARD
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