Murky, but the puzzle is pleasing and the long-delayed “reveal” is a genuine surprise.
A four-year-old girl abandoned aboard a ship touches off a century-long inquiry into her ancestry, in Morton’s weighty, at times unwieldy, second novel (The House at Riverton, 2008).
In 1913, Hugh, portmaster of Maryborough, Australia, discovers a child alone on a vessel newly arrived from England. The little girl cannot recall her name and has no identification, only a white suitcase containing some clothes and a book of fairy tales by Eliza Makepeace. Hugh and his wife, childless after several miscarriages, name the girl Nell and raise her as their own. At 21, she is engaged to be married and has no idea she is not their biological daughter. When Hugh confesses the truth, Nell’s equilibrium is destroyed, but life and World War II intervene, and she doesn’t explore her true origins until 1975, when she journeys to London. There she learns of Eliza’s sickly cousin Rose, daughter of Lord Linus Mountrachet and his lowborn, tightly wound wife, Lady Adeline. Mountrachet’s beloved sister Georgiana disgraced the family by running off to London to live in squalor with a sailor, who then abruptly disappeared. Eliza was their daughter, reclaimed by Linus after Georgiana’s death and brought back to Blackhurst, the gloomy Mountrachet manor in Cornwall. Interviewing secretive locals at Blackhurst, now under renovation as a hotel, Nell traces her parentage to Rose and her husband, society portraitist Nathaniel Walker—except that their only daughter died at age four. Nell’s quest is interrupted at this point, but after her death in 2005, her granddaughter Cassandra takes it up. Intricate, intersecting narratives, heavy-handed fairy-tale symbolism and a giant red herring suggesting possible incest create a thicket of clues as impenetrable and treacherous as Eliza’s overgrown garden and the twisty maze on the Mountrachet estate.
Murky, but the puzzle is pleasing and the long-delayed “reveal” is a genuine surprise.Pub Date: April 7, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5054-9
Page Count: 552
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
Blood, guts, history and horses from the expert. Excellent sport.
Cornwell continues The Saxon Novels with further rowdy adventures in the Northern kingdoms (The Pale Horseman, Jan. 2006, etc.).
Alfred, the great but cranky Saxon monarch, is largely offstage in this particularly choice segment of what is turning into a satisfyingly long look at England in the ninth century. Returning to Cumberland, where the series started, Cornwell pairs his Saxon-turned-Danish-warrior Uhtred of Bebbanburg with another young hero Guthred, king of—well, king of not very much. Yet. But Guthred, a Dane with a claim to territory around the future city of York, is a charmer, and he is one of the chess pieces in the game Alfred is playing back in Wessex. Although he has the blood and the charisma (and a gorgeous sister for whom Uhtred falls hard), Guthred is not an instinctive warrior, but as he rides around the wild countryside trying to put together a small army, Guthred learns a lot from Uhtred—not just battle skills, but also political skills. Uhtred, who can barely tolerate the cerebral, constipated, stingy King Alfred, to whom his oath has bound him, perceives that Alfred knows kingship better than anyone in England, and he constantly provides Guthred with examples of Alfredian realpolitik. The young king is such a good student that he doesn’t hesitate to sell Uhtred into slavery when that action is needed to clinch an important deal. So Uhtred, still in his early 20s, spends a couple of years pulling an oar for a Danish coastal trader, seeing much of the Baltic and even making it across the Atlantic for a bit. Fortunately, he’s not been forgotten by King Alfred, and he is eventually freed to resume working with Guthred and plotting to regain the castle his uncle stole from him.
Blood, guts, history and horses from the expert. Excellent sport.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2007
ISBN: 0-06-088862-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
An in-the-trenches view of the Spanish Civil War. Wolff was the last commander of the American volunteers who battled alongside the Spanish Loyalists, defenders of the progressive and democratically elected government on which General Franco, supported by Mussolini and Hitler, declared war in 1936. While the rest of the world watched, young volunteers came from around the world to fight on the front lines against fascism. Wolff, a 21-year-old from Brooklyn, hopped on a boat for France, then walked over the Pyrenees and started serving as a water carrier. As the eight leaders of the Lincoln and Washington Battalions were either killed or wounded, he found himself moving steadily up through the ranks until he was in command—just in time for the bloodiest and most hopeless campaigns. More than 50 years later Wolff has written a thinly veiled memoir of that period. He casts Mitch Castle as himself and creates an alter-ego in Leo Rogin, a hapless volunteer who falters in times of crisis (unlike Castle, who seems to be one of those rare individuals able to block out thoughts of mortality while charging at trenches). It may be out of modesty that Wolff has decided to write fiction instead of a straight memoir, but in trying to come up with a novelistic theme—Castle's blind heroism vs. Rogin's bald fear—he invites higher expectations that he cannot meet. Another Hill impressively captures the minute-to-minute, day-to-day chaos of the trenches, as well as the grim inevitability of horrible death and suffering all around, but it is little more than a series of battlefield anecdotes devoid of a larger context. Falls flat as a novel, but as a memoir it is a gripping account of the bravery of non-military men fighting for a just cause.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-252-02091-X
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Univ. of Illinois
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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