A many-layered delight.
A sensuous tale of power, customs, and change.
In the city of Hagen, there stands a church, a prison, a city hall, and a bustling market. But there is—and always has been—only one bakery and one baking family. As Emmi’s debut novel opens, Hans Heckler II prepares a cake for the annual Easter contest, held beneath a spoon-wielding statue of his “grandmother’s grandfather’s grandmother” Margarete. Every year, Hans wins the contest with one of the 10 cakes he serves at his shop. But although each generation since Margarete’s has added a new recipe, Hans feels no compulsion to invent. He likens the family collection to the Holy Bible: perfect and therefore complete. In truth, Hans’ heart lies elsewhere—he longs to be a tailor and is in love with Anika Everhart, the flame-haired beekeeper. To cope with the mundane duties of the bakery, and the “beasts” of the town who shower him with “tongue-flapping adulation,” Hans hires 9-year-old Jonathan Von Brandt. The child loves to bake, but when it becomes clear, after many years, that Hans will never tell him the family recipes, Jonathan quits. Meanwhile, Anika has been quietly baking for herself since she was a child. With Jonathan’s help and her bees’ honey, Anika perfects the Honigkuchen cake, which is so good it brings Prince Goebel to his knees. Twice betrayed, Hans enlists the Rev. Abbing to plot wicked revenge. Like Hagen’s society, Emmi’s debut novel is grounded in tradition. He writes convincingly in the style of a European folk tale, with a timeless setting, a firm Christian underpinning, and just a hint of magic. But like the novel’s main characters, Emmi pushes beyond formula, adding themes that are relevant to contemporary tastes, such as resilience through diversity and the perils of dogma. As in the best modern fiction, characters, not morals, drive the story—and Emmi excels at creating rich, complex people. Hans is vengeful, but his thwarted yen for fashion makes him sympathetic, and even the minor players have depth, presence, and at least one dark secret to thicken the plot.
A many-layered delight.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-74563-2
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Hydrama Fiction
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
IN THE NEWS
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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