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
Slim pickings from the turn-of-the-century North Carolina tobacco industry, by the author of Scarlett (not reviewed) and a slew of other Southern-fried fiction (New Orleans Legacy, 1987, etc.). Nate Richardson is a virile and promiscuous 18-year-old tobacco farmer who falls in lust with Lily Gaskins, the coquette who marries his preacher brother, Gideon. The newlyweds move far away, enabling Nate to focus on his big plan to take over the burgeoning cigarette industry. A crucial part of his project involves wresting the patent for a revolutionary new cigarette- rolling machine from its doddering inventor, but the machine's price tag is high: Nate must marry the inventor's granddaughter, Francesca (Chess) Standish, and promise to give her children. Chess's head for books and figures serves charming front-man Nate well; the two are happy as partners, and business takes off. Nate's tobacco is the most golden and the tastiest; the machine he builds is better than that of the competition. His family quickly goes from picking worms off tobacco leaves to selecting fine clothing and furnishings for their nouveau-riche mansions. Although she loves him, Chess and Nate both remain dissatisfied with their sex life, which comes and goes in quick, cold spurts. Nate keeps mistresses, including Lily. Chess raises their daughter and doesn't know what she's missing until she meets her cousin Lord Randall Standish on a trip to London. Nate, busy selling cigarettes to the Brits, doesn't notice that Chess falls rapturously into the lord's arms, where she learns the pleasures of the flesh. Returning to America, they learn that Lily's next child may be Nate's and that Lord Randall wants Chess back; the couple must decide whether to dissolve the partnership or fall in love. Unfortunately, Ripley provides little conflict, no subplots, and holds off on the steamy scenes until much too late in the book. A paperback original spilling out of its hardcover corset.
Pub Date: Nov. 25, 1994
ISBN: 0-446-51406-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
Equal parts romance, intrigue and history, a flawed but spirited work.
A historical novel of a young woman’s return to Europe and her service in the French resistance.
The Cross family ekes out a living in hardscrabble Kelly Flatt, Mo., where they have been brought by their father, an opera prodigy who fought in the Great War. When a lightning-felled tree kills her father, her mother turns to drink, forcing the thrush-voiced and raven-haired Christina Cross to find work in a hotel. There, Senator Liam Caradine discovers her vocal talent. Christina accepts the Senator’s patronage and performs at West Point under the smitten gaze of one Laurent de Gauvion Saint Cyr, grandson of the eponymous World War I general, who has come to seek American collaboration against French horizons dark with Hitler’s rearmament of Germany. In love with the paternal senator, Christina rebuffs Laurent, an infamous paramour, only to find herself again in his company when Germany attacks Austria and she, following in her father’s footsteps, travels to France to serve in the war effort. She brings her sister Nicolette to keep her safe from their drunken mother. They arrive in France just as their uncle, General Philippe Petain, is being sworn in as vice premiere of France. At first loyal to Philippe, Christina soon rejects his complacency toward the Nazis and her loyalty turns to Laurent and the resistance. She joins Operation Cri de Coeur, rescuing babies from Hitler’s camps with a submarine based in North African catacombs. But then the unthinkable happens: Nicolette is captured and sent to a Nazi work camp, eventually becoming a test subject for secret Nazi bio-weapons. Christina mounts a mission to infiltrate the camp and rescue Nicolette. Written with brio and filled with ecstatic reveries and 11th-hour rescues, St. Sure’s prose has a passion that often trumps clarity. Naïveté suitable to the ingénue bleeds into other characters’ speeches, even those of ostensibly great men cribbed from history. This tendency, in combination with a poor farm girl’s implausible relation to a political titan, erodes believability and undermines what manages to be an often action-driven and enjoyable ride.
Equal parts romance, intrigue and history, a flawed but spirited work.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-4196-6824-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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