A great read: Slick and quite sophisticated, this is at once poignant and hilarious.
A kind of Scottish Dallas from Hamilton (Other People’s Rules, 2000) concerns the awkward coming together—and falling apart—of a wealthy and powerful Edinburgh family in the aftermath of the death of the clan’s patriarch.
Sir Jack Macarthur is one of the most successful men in Scotland—so successful, in fact, that the public is willing to forget the fact that he’s really Italian. The son of a Neapolitan immigrant named Massaccio, Jack started life as a poor lad in the slums of Glasgow, but he and his brother Sandy had both made it big in the literary world—Sandy as a famous playwright, Jack as the founder of Eglinton Press. Happily married to the daughter of one of Scotland’s oldest families, Jack—whose name had been changed to Macarthur as a child—became a leading citizen in Edinburgh, taking a major role in the restoration of the historic neighborhood of New Town and creating a famous country estate for his family at Ardgay. As in all families, Jack had a few skeletons in his closet: His elder son Duncan is gay, his younger son Ben is a hopeless ne’er-do-well, and he has a mistress and an illegitimate daughter. But everyone gets along, more or less, and all are genuinely sorry when Jack dies of a heart attack. It’s only later that the troubles begin. A tabloid breaks the news, first, of Jack’s mistress and daughter and, later, of Duncan’s homosexuality. That’s bad enough, but it soon comes out that the gossip was leaked to a reporter by Jack’s own beloved nephew Luke, who was being blackmailed with some very nasty photographs of some of his S&M exploits. The word gets around the family very quickly, of course, especially since Luke is having an affair with one of Ben’s old mistresses. The family secrets reveal themselves one after another until, finally, everything is wrapped up to (almost) everyone’s satisfaction at the reading of the will.
A great read: Slick and quite sophisticated, this is at once poignant and hilarious.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-30504-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.
Another reboot of Jane Austen?!? Hadlow pulls it off in a smart, heartfelt novel devoted to bookish Mary, middle of the five sisters in Pride and Prejudice.
Part 1 recaps Pride and Prejudice through Mary’s eyes, climaxing with the humiliating moment when she sings poorly at a party and older sister Elizabeth goads their father to cut her off in front of everyone. The sisters’ friend Charlotte, who marries the unctuous Mr. Collins after Elizabeth rejects him, emerges as a pivotal character; her conversations with Mary are even tougher-minded here than those with Elizabeth depicted by Austen. In Part 2, two years later, Mary observes on a visit that Charlotte is deferential but remote with her husband; she forms an intellectual friendship with the neglected and surprisingly nice Mr. Collins that leads to Charlotte’s asking Mary to leave. In Part 3, Mary finds refuge in London with her kindly aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. Mrs. Gardiner is the second motherly woman, after Longbourn housekeeper Mrs. Hill, to try to undo the psychic damage wrought by Mary’s actual mother, shallow, status-obsessed Mrs. Bennet, by building up her confidence and buying her some nice clothes (funded by guilt-ridden Lizzy). Sure enough, two suitors appear: Tom Hayward, a poetry-loving lawyer who relishes Mary’s intellect but urges her to also express her feelings; and William Ryder, charming but feckless inheritor of a large fortune, whom naturally Mrs. Bennet loudly favors. It takes some maneuvering to orchestrate the estrangement of Mary and Tom, so clearly right for each other, but debut novelist Hadlow manages it with aplomb in a bravura passage describing a walking tour of the Lake District rife with seething complications furthered by odious Caroline Bingley. Her comeuppance at Mary’s hands marks the welcome final step in our heroine’s transformation from a self-doubting wallflower to a vibrant, self-assured woman who deserves her happy ending. Hadlow traces that progression with sensitivity, emotional clarity, and a quiet edge of social criticism Austen would have relished.
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-12941-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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