Amid a welter of window-dressing and a surfeit of repartee, the story gets lost in an overzealous and ultimately vain effort...
Faux 18th-century novel tandem-written by American history professors Lepore (Harvard Univ.; New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan, 2005, etc.) and Kamensky (Brandeis Univ.; The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse, 2008).
On the run from creditors in Edinburgh, Scottish portrait painter Stewart “Jamie” Jameson sets up shop in colonial Boston. His advertisement for an apprentice is answered by Fanny Easton, disguised as “Francis Weston.” The daughter of a prominent judge, Fanny/Francis fell from grace when her painting master got her pregnant. After the child was born dead (she thinks), her father disowned her, condemning her to the workhouse. But she’d learned something about art as well as dalliance from her teacher, and Jamie is struck by Weston’s talent. The duo earns renown as “face-painters,” numbering among their eager clients Samuel Bradstreet, an abolitionist and advocate for the cause of Liberty. When Bradstreet dies suddenly, the coroner determines that the cause was arsenic poisoning; Bradstreet’s slave Hannah, her daughter Phebe and husband Cicero are immediately suspected. Meanwhile, Jamie’s African friend Ignatius Alexander, an Oxford don turned fugitive slave, has surfaced and is hiding in the painter’s lodgings. After Cicero confesses to Bradstreet’s murder to save his wife and child, Alexander launches an inquiry to exculpate the slaves. The key is Bradstreet’s will, now missing, which frees Hannah and her child. Jamie, who bankrupted himself in Scotland to help Alexander, indebts himself further in the New World with a plan to send Weston to England to study with Joshua Reynolds. But his paternal attitude toward the boy is complicated by lust—which is puzzling, since like the rakes he’s supposed to resemble, Jamie’s heterosexuality is never in doubt. In an extended “explainer” scene, Alexander solves Bradstreet’s murder. The book veers vertiginously from Enlightenment-era satire to Lifetime-era family dysfunction in its humorless portrayal of Fanny’s villainous father.
Amid a welter of window-dressing and a surfeit of repartee, the story gets lost in an overzealous and ultimately vain effort to out-whack the wackiness of Shamela or Tristram Shandy.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-52619-7
Page Count: 600
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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