Morton’s finesse with family secrets increases with each novel.
A daughter refuses to let her mother take a grim secret to the grave.
In 1961, Laurel, a teenager sulking in a treehouse, sees her mother kill a man with a knife intended for her infant brother’s birthday cake. During the ensuing investigation, the police question Laurel, who leaves out a crucial detail. Just before her mother stabbed him, the man had said, “Hello, Dorothy. It’s been a long time.” Dorothy is cleared—the man is presumed to be a wanted pervert whom she killed in self-defense, and the Nicholson family life goes on as before, with Dorothy, husband Stephen and their five children enjoying life in their bucolic farmhouse. An early flashback reveals that Dorothy may have had a shady past, which induced her to flee London in 1941, at the urging of her friend Vivien, who was subsequently killed in the Blitz. In 2011, Dorothy is close to death. Laurel, now a famous actress in her 60s, embarks on a quest to learn the truth about the homicide. First, she learns that her mother’s victim, Henry Jenkins, had once been a prominent writer who fell from grace. Flashbacks from Dorothy’s POV and Laurel’s research reveal that during the war, Dorothy, whose family was killed by German bombs, attempts to befriend her fellow war-work volunteer, the somewhat aloof Vivien, an heiress who was also orphaned when a car crash claimed her parents and siblings in Australia. But Vivien is married to the controlling, jealousy-prone Jenkins, an author who’s also involved in intelligence work for the government. When Vivien inexplicably insults her, Dorothy assumes that slander from Vivien also caused Lady Gwendolyn, Dorothy’s late employer, to deny her a hoped-for inheritance. Together with her fiance, the talented and sensitive photographer Jimmy, Dorothy plots revenge in the form of blackmail, threatening to give Jenkins evidence of Vivien’s infidelity. Despite some improbable developments, the suspense mounts throughout, culminating in a shocking twist.
Morton’s finesse with family secrets increases with each novel.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5280-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
In part a perfectly paced mystery story, in part an Indian Wuthering Heights: a gorgeous and seductive fever dream of a...
A brilliantly constructed first novel that untangles an intricate web of sexual and caste conflict in a vivid style reminiscent of Salman Rushdie's early work.
The major characters are Estha and Rahel, the fraternal twin son and daughter of a wealthy family living in the province of Kerala. The family's prosperity is derived from a pickle factory and rubber estate, and their prideful Anglophilia essentially estranges them from their country's drift toward Communism and their ``inferiors' '' hunger for independence and equality. The events of a crucial December day in 1969—including an accidental death that may have been no accident and the violent consequences that afflict an illicit couple who have broken "the Love Law''—are the moral and narrative center around which the episodes of the novel repeatedly circle. Shifting backward and forward in time with effortless grace, Roy fashions a compelling nexus of personalities that influence the twins' "eerie stealth'' and furtive interdependence. These include their beautiful and mysteriously remote mother Ammu; her battling "Mammachi'' (who runs the pickle factory) and "Pappachi'' (an insufficiently renowned entomologist); their Oxford-educated Marxist Uncle Chacko and their wily "grandaunt'' Baby Kochamma; and the volatile laborite "Untouchable'' Velutha, whose relationship with the twins' family will prove his undoing. Roy conveys their explosive commingling in a vigorous prose dominated by odd syntactical and verbal combinations and coinages (a bad dream experience during midday nap-time is an "aftermare'') reminiscent of Gerard Manly Hopkins's "sprung rhythm,'' incantatory repetitions, striking metaphors (Velutha is seen ``standing in the shade of the rubber trees with coins of sunshine dancing on his body'') and sensuous descriptive passages (``The sky was orange, and the coconut trees were sea anemones waving their tentacles, hoping to trap and eat an unsuspecting cloud'').
In part a perfectly paced mystery story, in part an Indian Wuthering Heights: a gorgeous and seductive fever dream of a novel, and a truly spectacular debut. (First serial to Granta)Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-45731-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
The sequel and conclusion to Rice's The Witching Hour (1990) shows Rice both at her best and at her hackiest. Volume One brought forth the Mayfair Witches, an incestuous family in New Orleans' steamy Garden District, headed by supersurgeon Rowan Mayfair, who is putting some of the family's seven-and-a-half billion into the Mayfair Medical Institute. At that novel's end, Rowan had given birth to an "entity" on the living-room rug that, assuming human shape, had nearly killed husband Michael in the swimming pool, then abducted Rowan. Now the evil being—which looks like Durer's Christ and has been using witches in the Mayfair line to have itself reborn after dying time and again since the earliest days of the Reformation in Scotland— is skipping about Europe while trying to breed with Rowan and give birth to a female demon. But these porny pages don't arrive until we wade through 200 tediously undramatic sheets of dialogue filler quite lacking in storytelling oomph—though we are treated to teenygenius Mona Mayfair's seduction of the recovering Michael. All this is a case of background detail turning story into tapestry. Once Rice plunges us into Rowan's long rape, two miscarriages, and at last the birth of Emaleth, sister/wife for Rowan's demonic son Lasher, the novel lights up with rocket blast. How will Rowan escape her tyrant son, whose endless suckling and inseminating keeps her constantly orgasmic and horrified? But pigging out on Rowan's plight takes up only about 200 pages all told, and then more background filler—well, the novel's huge mythic underpinning- -dims our spirits, although the story of Uncle Julien, as told by Julien's ghost to Michael, dances nicely. Too much Rice-A-Roni, but addicts will lick the pot.
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-41295-6
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993
BOOK TO SCREEN
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