Reads like therapy notes by a clinician who needs better supervision.
An unemployed realtor confronts her grandmother’s obsession with a decades-old crime.
Wright (The Curse of Misty Wayfair, 2019, etc.) glosses over the reason Aggie Dunkirk was fired from her high-powered job—something to do with expired licenses for the agents she supervised. The real reason for her career’s demise is to get her back home to live with her strong-willed, imperious grandmother Mumsie. Aggie finds work at a local cemetery trying to recatalog gravesites disturbed by a recent flood, a job that gives her the chance to meet Collin O’Shaughnessy, a charming archaeologist with an accent that places his background somewhere in the former British Empire. Collin helps her cope with the shock of finding a dollhouse diorama in her grandmother’s attic depicting a young girl killed in her bedroom at the end of the Second World War. Wright toggles back and forth between Aggie’s grisly discovery and the story of Imogene Grayson, sister of a girl also murdered in her bedroom at the end of the war, until the two narratives intersect. Both past and present stories feel seriously underrealized because both the settings and events are described mainly in terms of the feelings they provoke in the characters. Even physical traits, like Mumsie’s flashing emerald eyes and Collin’s glowing copper hair, seem proxies for emotions. Where will all this trauma lead? It takes forever to find out.
Reads like therapy notes by a clinician who needs better supervision.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7642-3388-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bethany House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.
Another reboot of Jane Austen?!? Hadlow pulls it off in a smart, heartfelt novel devoted to bookish Mary, middle of the five sisters in Pride and Prejudice.
Part 1 recaps Pride and Prejudice through Mary’s eyes, climaxing with the humiliating moment when she sings poorly at a party and older sister Elizabeth goads their father to cut her off in front of everyone. The sisters’ friend Charlotte, who marries the unctuous Mr. Collins after Elizabeth rejects him, emerges as a pivotal character; her conversations with Mary are even tougher-minded here than those with Elizabeth depicted by Austen. In Part 2, two years later, Mary observes on a visit that Charlotte is deferential but remote with her husband; she forms an intellectual friendship with the neglected and surprisingly nice Mr. Collins that leads to Charlotte’s asking Mary to leave. In Part 3, Mary finds refuge in London with her kindly aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. Mrs. Gardiner is the second motherly woman, after Longbourn housekeeper Mrs. Hill, to try to undo the psychic damage wrought by Mary’s actual mother, shallow, status-obsessed Mrs. Bennet, by building up her confidence and buying her some nice clothes (funded by guilt-ridden Lizzy). Sure enough, two suitors appear: Tom Hayward, a poetry-loving lawyer who relishes Mary’s intellect but urges her to also express her feelings; and William Ryder, charming but feckless inheritor of a large fortune, whom naturally Mrs. Bennet loudly favors. It takes some maneuvering to orchestrate the estrangement of Mary and Tom, so clearly right for each other, but debut novelist Hadlow manages it with aplomb in a bravura passage describing a walking tour of the Lake District rife with seething complications furthered by odious Caroline Bingley. Her comeuppance at Mary’s hands marks the welcome final step in our heroine’s transformation from a self-doubting wallflower to a vibrant, self-assured woman who deserves her happy ending. Hadlow traces that progression with sensitivity, emotional clarity, and a quiet edge of social criticism Austen would have relished.
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-12941-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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