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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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