Long-winded and rather slow, with little by way of plot development or surprise, Ceely’s first nevertheless offers a good...
A young Irishwoman survives the Great Famine and a shipwreck but still dreams of escaping to America.
Ceely’s tale is based on a bundle of pages she discovered several years ago in the attic of an old upstate New York house. The result, she tells us, is Mina, “a transcription of the manuscript I found.” It’s 1848, and young “Paddy” Pigot, like all Famine refugees, has to hustle for a living in England—even to the point of changing his sex. For “Paddy” is really Mina, a young woman who passed herself off as a man in order to find work as a stablehand on a country estate. Eventually, Mina ends up working in the kitchen as an assistant to Mr. Serle, the Italian chef, but by then it’s too late to admit her ruse, and she continues as a man. She even shares a room with Mr. Serle, a kindly man who takes her under his wing and keeps quiet about the secret of her sex when she confides in him—telling him how, after their parents (like nearly everyone else in their village) died of starvation, Mina and her brother walked to Dublin and bought passage to America aboard the Abigail but were separated when the ship caught fire and sank. Mina was rescued, but her brother was taken aboard a ship bound for New York. That was when, destitute and alone, Mina cut her hair and sought work to escape the other bleak alternatives (prostitution or the poorhouse). After learning her story, Searle shares his own secret with Mina: He’s a Jew who fled Rome as a young man to escape the poverty of the ghetto. Both Searle and Mina dream of making their way to America—Mina to find her brother, Searle to open a restaurant and make his fortune. Could they, perhaps, succeed together where they failed on their own?
Long-winded and rather slow, with little by way of plot development or surprise, Ceely’s first nevertheless offers a good sketch of Victorian life with some nice historical shading.Pub Date: March 30, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-33690-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
