A long, unwieldy novel that recapitulates a story told better by its original author, with a final third setting up a story...
A retelling of Alexandre Dumas’ 1844 classic The Count of Monte Cristo that continues the story of Edmond Dantès.
The pseudonymous Holy Ghost Writer (The Count of Monte Cristo as Retold by Sherlock Holmes, 2013, etc.) offers 245 pages of new adventures for Dantès, aka the Count of Monte Cristo, narrated by Arthur Conan Doyle’s equally classic detective Sherlock Holmes (with a guest appearance by Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn). The new material, enough for a stand-alone novel by itself, is preceded by a 571-page recap of Dumas’ original novel, also narrated by Holmes. Given that the original is widely available in print and digital form, it’s hard to imagine why one would want to read a version that eliminates Dumas’ color and description. Holmes’ voice often sounds more like a 21st-century man’s (“Mercedes had no idea that [Fernand] was caught up in the thing with Edmond”) than Doyle’s meticulous, cerebral hero’s. The new material has Holmes befriending the much older Dantès and becoming embroiled in his life in the antebellum American South. Dantès is urged to go there by a mysterious, disembodied voice, which also advises him to buy a plantation and then free his slaves in order to show his neighbors that treating workers humanely gets better results than cruelty. The continuation also endows Dantès with not one, but two wives—Haydee and Mercedes from the original tale—and a passing liaison with a Bedouin girl, Raymee, produces twins. There’s also Black Beauty, an erstwhile slave whose son is widely assumed to be Dantès’; in fact, Holmes is his father. However, the plot never quite gets going, as the novel turns out to be merely a setup for a yet-to-be-published volume in which Dantès will prove to be the guiding force behind the Civil War and President Abraham Lincoln’s freeing of the slaves. The author also reveals that Dantès is the inventor of dry ice, Epsom salts and the greenhouse; the co-founder of Yale University’s legendary Skull and Bones Club; and a descendant of King Solomon, Jesus and the Merovingian kings. It effectively turns Dantès from a flawed hero who realizes too late the price of revenge to a two-dimensional uber-mensch.
A long, unwieldy novel that recapitulates a story told better by its original author, with a final third setting up a story that remains to be told.Pub Date: July 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1490406848
Page Count: 816
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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