Garwood's second foray into hardcover (after Saving Grace, 1993) is politically correct but gripping escapism of the tallest order. Naãve, prim, and repressed, Englishwoman Taylor Baker is the princess every romance reader longs to be—except that her prince, William Merritt, elopes with her mean-spirited cousin Jane. Life is further complicated by Uncle Malcolm, who has set his sights on Taylor's inheritance as well as her flesh. The only way that Taylor can evade those male-favoring inheritance laws is by making a deal with an American, Merritt's bastard brother no less, Civil War veteran and Montana rancher Lucas Ross. It's the 19th century's forerunner to the green-card marriage: Taylor pays him to marry her, which allows her to take custody of her orphaned nieces and keep her assets intact. He agrees to stay on his side of the bed and quietly divorce her on the other side of the Atlantic. But he's handsome, lovingly possessive, and, she discovers, a perfect embodiment of her romanticized notion of a mountain man. Taylor is a spunky heroine with a well-developed sense of justice, but the details of her transformation from lady of the manor to frontier homesteader are missing, as is the full figure of Lucas, who conducts vengeance killings away from the main action. Villainous Uncle Malcolm is barely sketched and quickly dispensed with at the end. Why can't Taylor fight it out with Malcolm and really show off her new competence? And how can someone as competent as Taylor (and as rich) put up with Lucas's possessiveness? How can he give up his freedom, and his passion for vengeance, so easily? How can she close her eyes to his killings? By boldly undercutting the assumptions of the genre, Garwood has revealed its unfeasible core. A good read that would be an even better movie—and another surefire bestseller for Garwood. (Literary Guild alternate selection)
Pub Date: June 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-87095-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1994
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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