Burke’s gritty coming-of-age tale is a typically entertaining read that may cap a trilogy but also begs for a sequel.
The Holland clan that features in various series by the prolific author appears this time in 1952 Houston, where street gangs, mobsters, and class conflict offer a grim view of postwar America.
At 17, Aaron Holland Broussard falls in love with the brainy, beautiful Valerie Epstein just as she’s dumping the scion of one of the city’s wealthiest families. Aaron then upsets a gang of toughs in Valerie’s neighborhood, his best friend drifts into dealing drugs and stealing cars with two Mexican hoods, and the scion turns out to be tied to the twisted son of a vicious local mobster. When a Cadillac used to hide cash and gold goes missing, all the players are involved. Through Aaron’s narration, Burke (House of the Rising Sun, 2015, etc.) muses on courage and one’s response to serious challenges. Aaron’s father went over the top from WWI’s trenches, another man dropped behind enemy lines in WWII, and a third battles alcohol and unemployment. Aaron discovers he is brutally capable with his fists. It’s a rough summer for any teen, though a reference by Aaron to “my trek up Golgotha” is over-the-top in another way. Purplish prose, facile psychology, and short-changed female characters are the trade-offs with this highly readable and sometimes eloquent writer. Burke, age 79, who has said this novel completes a trilogy with Wayfaring Stranger (2014) and Rising Sun (2015), was born in Houston and sets Aaron’s age to match his own in 1952 while also marking him as a would-be writer and having him tell his story some 60 years after the novel’s events. The personal elements might intrigue fans, suggesting real influences for an author whose characters frequently tap reserves of violence and courage to cope with past sins and present evil.
Burke’s gritty coming-of-age tale is a typically entertaining read that may cap a trilogy but also begs for a sequel.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-501-10720-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
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