by Jude Morgan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 5, 2005
A sprightly, intelligent romp through chartered territory.
Three iconoclastic British poets—Byron, Keats and Shelley—are viewed through the prism of the women who defied parents, husbands and social norms to be at their sides, from the author of The King’s Touch (2004).
Whether historical or romantic fiction, or a melding of the two, this is a sensational story of money, marriage and, above all, high-wrought emotion. Mary Godwin, beloved daughter of philosopher William Godwin and radical writer Mary Wollstonecraft, is destined for Shelley, the married but discontented free-thinking writer who visits her household. After their elopement, Godwin ostracizes her. Caroline Ponsonby—rich, high-born and high-strung—marries William Lamb but discovers greater excitement as the lover of beautiful, rakish Lord Byron, whose Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage has made him the toast of the town. Byron’s half-sister Augusta marries a ne’er-do-well colonel whose spendthrift ways cause her to turn to Byron for financial help. She too becomes his lover. It is Augusta who then urges Byron to marry Annabella Milbanke, as a means of ending their illicit involvement. But after the birth of a daughter, Annabella separates from Byron, and the resulting scandal—inflamed by obsessive Caroline Lamb’s disclosures—renders Byron a pariah. Ruined, he moves to Switzerland, encountering Shelley and Mary in Geneva. During nights spent together at the Villa Diodati, ghost stories are first read, then invented, inspiring Mary to write Frankenstein. Fanny Brawne and Keats put in a late, short, tragic appearance, their intense love doomed by his tuberculosis. Although engaged, they will never marry. Keats dies in Rome, Shelley drowns in Italy and Byron expires in Greece. Augusta repents, Fanny remembers, Mary returns to her father and raises her one surviving child.
A sprightly, intelligent romp through chartered territory.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-34368-X
Page Count: 544
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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