Mildly entertaining, Ryan's debut novel seems overfamiliar and too intent on warming the heart.
While their men are off fighting the Nazis, the women in the English village of Chilbury struggle to carry on.
Though the action spans only a few months in 1940, a lot happens: there are bombings, a nefarious baby-swapping scheme, passionate love affairs, acts of espionage and of great valor. The Chilbury women, it seems, are always being tested. What binds them together and lifts their spirits is their participation in the local church choir, transformed with the advent of war from a coed chorus to an all-female one. The story is told through the women’s letters and journal entries, which can make for some clumsy exposition. Key figures include the sensible widow and nurse Mrs. Tilling, the scheming midwife Miss Paltry, Kitty Winthrop, a plucky, headstrong 13-year-old, and her older sister, Venetia, the town beauty and a heedless flirt until she falls hard for a secretive artist. All are borderline stock characters, and little that happens in the book is unexpected—though the brutality of Brig. Winthrop, Kitty and Venetia’s father, does come as a bit of a shock. The author also tends to tell rather than show: asked if she thinks that singing will help the women get through the war, the choir director answers, “Music takes us out of ourselves, away from our worries and tragedies….All those cadences and beautiful chord changes, every one of them makes you feel a different splendor of life.” Real tragedy visits the town, but it doesn’t fully register. And subplots involving homosexuality and abortion seem designed to make a period piece feel more contemporary. Still, the book is well-paced, especially in the second half, and readers may find themselves furiously turning pages even if they can easily predict what’s coming next.
Mildly entertaining, Ryan's debut novel seems overfamiliar and too intent on warming the heart.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-90675-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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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