STAR OF THE SEA

Name: STAR OF THE SEA
Author: Joseph O’Connor
ISBN: 0-15-100908-2

by Joseph O’Connor ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Irish author O’Connor (Yeats Is Dead!, 2001; etc.) pulls out all the melodramatic stops for a thrilling tale without once...

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A bumptious epic about a New World–bound ship Star of the Sea, full of raging immigrants, conflicted aristocrats, and a flint-eyed murderer.

It’s the tumultuous year of 1847 when O’Connor’s gallimaufry of characters board a “coffin ship” bound from Ireland to New York. Hundreds of famine refugees huddle in steerage, while just above them a handful of first-class passengers reside in splendor, though they’re rent with hidden intrigues—and all hear the thudding gait of the loner with the bad leg who wanders the ship at night. At center are two men in particular: the aristocrat David Merridith and the limping loner, Pius Mulvey. Merridith is a self-loathing scion of a British family that had long owned a large chunk of Ireland. When the estate’s fortunes crashed, at the height of the famine, most of the tenant families were put off the land—while corpses littered the countryside. Now on his way to New York with wife and children, Merridith has many secrets, most concerning their servant, Mary Duane. Pius is of a different stripe, though he hates himself just as much: having abandoned a pregnant girlfriend and his slightly mad brother in Ireland, Pius made himself into a high-living thief in London’s East End, one night even giving great inspiration to Charles Dickens, who was slumming for material. Later come to ruin, Pius has been embarked on a mission by some Hibernian thugs who won’t take no for an answer: kill the English scum David Merridith. Told mostly in flashbacks, and mostly through the highly arched voice of first-class passenger and journalist Grantley Dixon, this is the sort of gloriously overstuffed story that could be told in hushed breath over fifteen or so lengthy installments on late-night radio.

Irish author O’Connor (Yeats Is Dead!, 2001; etc.) pulls out all the melodramatic stops for a thrilling tale without once losing his eye for the right detail or his ear for the perfect phrase.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-15-100908-2

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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THE KITCHEN HOUSE

by Kathleen Grissom ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 2, 2010

Melodramatic for sure, but the author manages to avoid stereotypes while maintaining a brisk pace.

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Irish orphan finds a new family among slaves in Grissom’s pulse-quickening debut.

Lavinia is only six in 1791, when her parents die aboard ship and the captain, James Pyke, brings her to work as an indentured servant at Tall Oaks, his Virginia plantation. Pyke’s illegitimate daughter Belle, chief cook (and alternate narrator with Lavinia), takes reluctant charge of the little white girl. Belle and the other house slaves, including Mama Mae and Papa George, their son Ben, grizzled Uncle Jacob and youngsters Beattie and Fanny, soon embrace Lavinia as their own. Otherwise, life at Tall Oaks is grim. Pyke’s wife Martha sinks deeper into laudanum addiction during the captain’s long absences. Brutal, drunken overseer Rankin starves and beats the field slaves. The Pykes’ 11-year-old son Marshall “accidentally” causes his young sister Sally’s death, and Ben is horribly mutilated by Rankin. When Martha, distraught over Sally, ignores her infant son Campbell, Lavinia bonds with the baby, as well as with Sukey, daughter of Campbell’s black wet nurse Dory. Captain Pyke’s trip to Philadelphia to find a husband for Belle proves disastrous; Dory and Campbell die of yellow fever, and Pyke contracts a chronic infection that will eventually kill him. Marshall is sent to boarding school, but returns from time to time to wreak havoc, which includes raping Belle, whom he doesn’t know is his half-sister. After the captain dies, through a convoluted convergence of events, Lavinia marries Marshall and at 17 becomes the mistress of Tall Oaks. At first her savior, Marshall is soon Lavinia’s jailer. Kindly neighboring farmer Will rescues several Tall Oaks slaves, among them Ben and Belle, who, unbeknownst to all, was emancipated by the captain years ago. As Rankin and Marshall outdo each other in infamy, the stage is set for a breathless but excruciatingly attenuated denouement.

Melodramatic for sure, but the author manages to avoid stereotypes while maintaining a brisk pace.

Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2010

ISBN: 978-1-4391-5366-6

Page Count: 384

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS

by Arundhati Roy ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1997

In part a perfectly paced mystery story, in part an Indian Wuthering Heights: a gorgeous and seductive fever dream of a...

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A brilliantly constructed first novel that untangles an intricate web of sexual and caste conflict in a vivid style reminiscent of Salman Rushdie's early work.

The major characters are Estha and Rahel, the fraternal twin son and daughter of a wealthy family living in the province of Kerala. The family's prosperity is derived from a pickle factory and rubber estate, and their prideful Anglophilia essentially estranges them from their country's drift toward Communism and their ``inferiors' '' hunger for independence and equality. The events of a crucial December day in 1969—including an accidental death that may have been no accident and the violent consequences that afflict an illicit couple who have broken "the Love Law''—are the moral and narrative center around which the episodes of the novel repeatedly circle. Shifting backward and forward in time with effortless grace, Roy fashions a compelling nexus of personalities that influence the twins' "eerie stealth'' and furtive interdependence. These include their beautiful and mysteriously remote mother Ammu; her battling "Mammachi'' (who runs the pickle factory) and "Pappachi'' (an insufficiently renowned entomologist); their Oxford-educated Marxist Uncle Chacko and their wily "grandaunt'' Baby Kochamma; and the volatile laborite "Untouchable'' Velutha, whose relationship with the twins' family will prove his undoing. Roy conveys their explosive commingling in a vigorous prose dominated by odd syntactical and verbal combinations and coinages (a bad dream experience during midday nap-time is an "aftermare'') reminiscent of Gerard Manly Hopkins's "sprung rhythm,'' incantatory repetitions, striking metaphors (Velutha is seen ``standing in the shade of the rubber trees with coins of sunshine dancing on his body'') and sensuous descriptive passages (``The sky was orange, and the coconut trees were sea anemones waving their tentacles, hoping to trap and eat an unsuspecting cloud'').

In part a perfectly paced mystery story, in part an Indian Wuthering Heights: a gorgeous and seductive fever dream of a novel, and a truly spectacular debut. (First serial to Granta)