An engaging tale about a transplanted Southerner questioning the Confederacy as he pursues a wartime romance.
A Confederate spy and a Pennsylvania Quaker fall in love during the Civil War.
In this novel, Coopey (Full Circle, 2016, etc.) reimagines the lives of two of her ancestors, drawing on both family lore and historical research to produce a well-rounded story. Carter Willoughby is the only remaining son of a plantation-owning Georgia family. After checking in on his parents and sisters, all suffering from the war, he goes to Pennsylvania in disguise. He pretends to be an “anti-slavery, anti-rebellion Methodist” circuit rider named Mark Randolph while actually planning to destroy a crucial part of the railroad system. In Pennsylvania, he rents a room from Susannah Lander, a Quaker who lives in poverty with an aging aunt while fending off unwanted suitors and fighting for support from her stingy uncle. Susannah challenges Carter’s beliefs about the war, and gradually they move from sparring to friendship to love. After Carter reveals his secret and breaks with the Confederate Army, they marry. Susannah is pregnant when he returns to Georgia at the end of the war. Hoping to settle his family’s estate, he loses the remaining wealth and struggles to return to Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, Susannah faces trials at home without her husband. Coopey does an excellent job of blending fact and fiction (an author’s note explains the story’s factual basis), and her vivid historical details bring the setting to life. Susannah is a compelling heroine, dealing with problems both realistic and melodramatic in a satisfying way. Coopey never allows readers to forget the bleakness of her life (“I kept up my daily routine of mucking out the barn, pruning fruit trees, planting onions or whatever else was asked of me”). The book’s characters of color remain in distinctly secondary roles. Although Carter’s views on slavery evolve over the course of the narrative, his redemption may be too simplistic for some readers.
An engaging tale about a transplanted Southerner questioning the Confederacy as he pursues a wartime romance.Pub Date: July 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9979351-2-7
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Fox Hollow Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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