Johnson’s innovative style and tone (informed by her own Moroccan vision-quest) transforms what could have been a...
Two needlewomen, centuries apart, find love and career satisfaction in Morocco in this novel from Johnson, the publishing director at HarperCollins UK .
In the early 17th century, corsairs (aka Barbary pirates) from Salé and other Moroccan cities raided coastal waters and villages in the British Isles, kidnapping and enslaving sailors, fisherman and townsfolk. Johnson employs two through-lines, past and present. Julia, a London yuppie and textile craftswoman, is dumped by her longtime lover, antiquarian book dealer Michael, husband of Julia’s best friend, Anna. As a consolation prize Michael hands Julia an antique leather-bound Needle-Woman’s Glorie, a handbook of embroidery patterns, defaced by the marginal jottings of a flame-tressed woman named Cat, age 19. In 1625, Cat, a housemaid to minor Cornish nobility, is reluctantly betrothed to her adoring cousin Rob. She has ambitions that would take her far from her native Penzance, Cornwall. She’s been stitching an altar cloth of her own design for the Countess of Salisbury, hoping to gain entry to the all-male Broderers Guild. By chance, Cat attends a Puritan church service. In mid-sermon, Barbary pirates swarm in and abduct the congregation. Shackled in the ship’s filthy hold, the captives endure starvation and disease. When Al-Andalusi, the ship’s raïs (captain), is wounded in a sea battle, Cat is summoned to his cabin to suture his wounds. Smitten, Al-Andalusi has semi-honorable designs on her. But as the ship approaches Salé harbor, she insults his Muslim faith and is dispatched to the auction block. Back in the present, Michael realizes he’s unintentionally given Julia a priceless artifact. He stalks her to Morocco, where she’s gone to research Cat’s story. But thanks to Julia’s historical quest and a handsome guide named Idriss, she’s now Michael-proof. Cat, sold to a rich merchant, manages his all-female embroidery factory. But the identity of her master is uncertain—could it be the raïs, who’s growing on Cat by the day?
Johnson’s innovative style and tone (informed by her own Moroccan vision-quest) transforms what could have been a conventional swashbuckler-bodice ripper into a witty page-turner.Pub Date: May 6, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-40522-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
Still struggling to adapt to the rigors of Parkerville, Calif. (``Gateway to the High Country'')—her switch from academic research to hands-on plant pathology; her oil-and-vinegar romance with U.C. Extension botanist Sam Cooper; all that sunshine, all those Republicans—M.I.T. transplant Claire Sharples is restless even before she stumbles over the body of Jonathan Levine, an L.A. Free Press reporter drowned in an irrigation canal with a strange yellow flower from hours away stuck in his buttonhole. Parkerville police chief Tom Martelli belittles Claire's curiosity at his peril: She digs into the story on pesticide abuse Jonathan had been following, links his demise to the deaths of two Mexican workers also found in watery graves, and leaves Sam in a snit (after returning from a trip to L.A. to find his car parked outside his ``friend'' Linda Nelson's house at dawn) for lodgings in Jonathan's seedy motel room. Before she's through, Claire will have peered so closely at every man in the case—imperious grape grower Bert Yankovich; his kid brother Emil, a stuttering liberal in love with Claire; pertinacious walnut grower Wayne Harris; even Jeff Green, her knockout blind date down in L.A.—that you'll wonder if she can ever think about a man again without a shudder. As in The Bulrush Murders (1991), Rothenberg is knowing and exact about how lovers and other people fight, and her tale is twistier than mile-high blacktop.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-89296-561-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Taibo's waggish novels about Mexico City shamus Hector Belascoar†n Shayne (No Happy Ending, 1993, etc.) often gave the impression of wanting to be the last detective stories ever written. That impression's even stronger in this novel-about-a- novel that sends mystery writer JosÇ Daniel Fierro, who squeezes orange juice by hand and urinates sitting down, to the northern town of Santa Ana as its new police chief. Against a backdrop of laughably epidemic ruling-party corruption and anti-union warfare, JD and his colorful underlings (an assistant who only answers to ``Blind Man,'' officers who once worked as activists or sold insurance) battle the federal judicial police (who as always are intent on a cover-up) to identify a killer: Someone followed American photographer Anne Goldin from her tryst with Santa Ana's mayor and left her nude, stabbed body in front of the altar at the Church of Carmen. It's only the first of several murders, each of which implicates the victim neatly in the preceding murder. But the case itself, as JD muses in his interspersed letters to his wife back home and in his ``Notes for the History of the Radical City Government of Santa Ana,'' is anything but neat. JD ``discovers nothing, only that things simply happen,'' as in life itself. JD is on target on his own novel's shortcomings: ``It lacks a hook, dramatic architecture, the negative characters...are badly drawn.'' But this end-of-the-road fantasy, so full of Taibo's melancholy cartoon gaiety, will be a feast for connoisseurs.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-89296-518-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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