Mosse’s prose has a gossamer quality well suited to the fantasy she spins.
Romantic spookery in a small village in southwest France in the 1920s, from Mosse (Sepulchre, 2008, etc.), co-founder of the Orange Prize for Fiction.
Freddie Watson is a man on a mission. Parchment manuscript in hand, he goes to a bookstore in Toulouse to find someone able to translate Occitan, the medieval language of the region, into English. From that moment unfolds a tale that had begun several years before, on which one winter’s night Freddie had found himself traveling through the remote area of Occitania. Freddie’s recent past had been characterized by melancholia, a condition created by his distant and unloving parents as well as by the death of his beloved older brother George the day before the first assault on the Somme. For five years after he received news of George’s death, Freddie tried to repress his grief, but he finally had a mental breakdown and was hospitalized. Even in 1928 he still feels traumatized by the war that had taken his brother away. When he finds himself stranded in a remote valley, he begins to enter briefly into the life of the village (appropriately called Nulle), which is about to celebrate the fête de St. Etienne, a fixture of communal life since medieval times. At the local Ostal he meets the inscrutable and mysterious Fabrissa, a lovely, delicate woman who seems to know more about Freddie’s loss than is humanly possible. Freddie is of course dazzled by this bewildering and bewitching woman, and the townspeople are mystified as well when Freddie tries to tell them about his encounter, for they know of no one named Fabrissa. A story eventually emerges about a village tragedy that had occurred in the 14th century, when Catharism was rampant in the area and the villagers had taken refuge in some local caves. Fabrissa—or her ghostly self—ultimately helps Freddie deal with his painful present and serves as a redemptive force in his life.
Mosse’s prose has a gossamer quality well suited to the fantasy she spins.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-399-15715-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally...
Yale’s secret societies hide a supernatural secret in this fantasy/murder mystery/school story.
Most Yale students get admitted through some combination of impressive academics, athletics, extracurriculars, family connections, and donations, or perhaps bribing the right coach. Not Galaxy “Alex” Stern. The protagonist of Bardugo’s (King of Scars, 2019, etc.) first novel for adults, a high school dropout and low-level drug dealer, Alex got in because she can see dead people. A Yale dean who's a member of Lethe, one of the college’s famously mysterious secret societies, offers Alex a free ride if she will use her spook-spotting abilities to help Lethe with its mission: overseeing the other secret societies’ occult rituals. In Bardugo’s universe, the “Ancient Eight” secret societies (Lethe is the eponymous Ninth House) are not just old boys’ breeding grounds for the CIA, CEOs, Supreme Court justices, and so on, as they are in ours; they’re wielders of actual magic. Skull and Bones performs prognostications by borrowing patients from the local hospital, cutting them open, and examining their entrails. St. Elmo’s specializes in weather magic, useful for commodities traders; Aurelian, in unbreakable contracts; Manuscript goes in for glamours, or “illusions and lies,” helpful to politicians and movie stars alike. And all these rituals attract ghosts. It’s Alex’s job to keep the supernatural forces from embarrassing the magical elite by releasing chaos into the community (all while trying desperately to keep her grades up). “Dealing with ghosts was like riding the subway: Do not make eye contact. Do not smile. Do not engage. Otherwise, you never know what might follow you home.” A townie’s murder sets in motion a taut plot full of drug deals, drunken assaults, corruption, and cover-ups. Loyalties stretch and snap. Under it all runs the deep, dark river of ambition and anxiety that at once powers and undermines the Yale experience. Alex may have more reason than most to feel like an imposter, but anyone who’s spent time around the golden children of the Ivy League will likely recognize her self-doubt.
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally dazzling sequels.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31307-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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