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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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