A well-crafted page-turner for history buffs, Francophiles, and casual fiction fans alike.
In Flanders’ gripping historical novel, a Boston businessman searches for his missing brother in 1793 Paris as France teeters on the verge of implosion.
Twenty-nine-year-old merchant trader Calvin Tarkington arrives in the French capital during the turbulent summer after King Louis XVI’s execution. The country’s revolutionaries are breaking into rival factions, with distrust and paranoia settling into their ranks. Calvin is in the city to resolve some business matters with his older brother, Alexander, following their father’s death. But Alexander, who normally runs the Tarkingtons’ Paris trade, is nowhere to be found. Calvin quickly learns that his brother has come under suspicion of local authorities, who believe that Alexander was spying at the behest of England. Confident that his brother is innocent, Calvin enlists the help of the city’s American expatriate community to help locate him. In the process, he becomes enamored with Sarah Gomez Hays, the daring, dark-haired daughter of a Jewish-American businessman. However, due to their different faiths, Calvin’s prospects of a match with her seem as bleak as his chances of finding his brother. This novel is populated by a roster of well-researched and finely sketched historical figures, including boozy Thomas Paine, whose 1776 pamphlet Common Sense helped inspire the American Revolution and who had a hand in France’s uprising; Peter Ostiquette, an Oneida Native American brought to France by the Marquis de Lafayette; and the author and women’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft. Calvin feels a touch flat in comparison to the vibrant characters that surround him; he’s a dusty scholar who’s forced to act the hero rather than a compelling hero in his own right. Flanders makes up for it, however, with his skillful narrative, striking a delicate balance between authentic, antique flavor and easy-to-read prose. As a result, he sets a fine 18th-century scene that won’t trip up 21st-century readers.
A well-crafted page-turner for history buffs, Francophiles, and casual fiction fans alike.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0988784062
Page Count: 366
Publisher: Munroe Hill Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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