With an announced million-copy initial printing and a national author tour, this is sure to be one of the season’s...
A massive, cat-squashing, multigenerational and multifamilial saga, the first volume of what Follett (World Without End, 2007, etc.) promises as a trilogy devoted to the awful 20th century.
The giants in question, metaphorically, are the great and noble families of old Europe, a generally useless lot with a few notable exceptions. One such worthy, Lord Fitzherbert (try not to think of Bridget Jones here), is a sun around which lesser planets circle, a decent fellow who had been an admiral, British ambassador to the tsar’s court at St. Petersburg, and a government minister. His son, Earl Fitzherbert, is less notable, if fabulously wealthy: He “had done nothing to earn his huge income,” and the presence of the awful Liberals in Parliament, Winston Churchill among them, keeps him from coming into his own as the great foreign secretary he wishes he could be. Into the Fitzherbertian orbit fall the Williamses, Welsh colliers of sweet voice and radical disposition; if Follett’s sprawling story has a center, it is in Billy, who is but 13 as the saga opens and has a great deal of growing up to do. In the outlying reaches of the galaxy is Grigori Peshkov, plotter of the Bolshevik victory and slayer of tsarist officers in a scene straight out of Doctor Zhivago, a confidant of Trotsky’s, who figures in the later pages (“Trotsky took the bad news calmly. Lenin would have thrown a fit”). He’s just one of history’s greats to bow into Follett’s pages: Churchill figures into the story, as does Woodrow Wilson. But so, too, does a full six-page dramatis personae, so that there’s never a dull or unpeopled moment. Throughout it all, Follett keeps a dependable narrative chugging along; if the writing is never exalted, it is never less than workmanlike, though one wonders about anachronisms here and there. (Did Woodrow Wilson, college president and master diplomat, really say “Heck”?)
With an announced million-copy initial printing and a national author tour, this is sure to be one of the season’s inevitable and unavoidable blockbusters—and not undeservedly.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-525-95165-0
Page Count: 1008
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
A novel that agrees with Shakespeare that all the world’s a stage.
A sleight-of-hand novel about a seaside British revue in the late 1950s, before everything changed.
Master novelist Swift (Last Orders, 1996, etc.) invites readers to see parallels between the tricks he is pulling and the magic act that is the ostensible subject of his novel. Or is it? As Swift writes of a magician and the assistant to whom he is betrothed, “The act had become a fluid phenomenon, yet full of a thrilling tension. You never knew what might happen next. This in itself became part of the attraction.” And so it is with this slight but charming novel, which opens with two men and a woman, introducing a triangle. The woman is Evie ("first of women”), and the names of the two men keep shifting, as the novel suggests that identities tend to do. One is Jack, the emcee of the show, a song-and-dance man in charge of the pacing of the production. The other is magician Ronnie, who becomes “the Great Pablo” at Jack’s behest. Though the novel seems to introduce Jack as the protagonist, it is Ronnie’s backstory that dominates. Where Jack and Evie had both been pushed toward the stage by showbiz mothers, “Ronnie Deane was a different kettle of fish and as Evie, but only with some persistence, would find out, had had a different introduction to the world of entertainment, and a different kind of mother.” Two of them, in fact, or maybe two different childhoods, as he had been sent to safety during the World War II bombings by an impoverished mother to a more privileged home in the countryside. There, Ronnie became a different boy, with a different destiny, one that would lead him first to Jack and then, at Jack’s behest, to Evie. The bare bones of the plot don’t have much more flesh on them, but the hocus pocus of identity and destiny, how we become who we are and make the choices we do, offers plenty of surprise as well as revelation.<
A novel that agrees with Shakespeare that all the world’s a stage.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-65805-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A thorough and well-researched if sometimes flowery saga of the Jefferson family.
A Founding Father’s daughter tells all!
At the age of 10, upon the death of her mother, Patsy Jefferson steps into the role of mistress of the house for her father, Thomas. Patsy, our narrator, recounts the story of a man of great contradictions. He proclaims his love for domestic life but is repeatedly drawn to public service and repeatedly fails to manage his great estate, Monticello, losing it after his death to creditors. Then there is the matter of his slaves—“Our slave-holding spokesman for freedom,” taunts a schoolmate of Patsy’s when Jefferson serves as an American envoy in Paris. His hypocrisy includes a long-standing affair with Sally Hemings, who was not only his slave, but his wife’s sister. Authors Dray (Daughters of the Nile, 2013, etc.) and Kamoie (Irons in the Fire, 2007) have performed tireless research. Whether it's detailing Patsy’s life as a debutante in Paris, where she dances with Lafayette and witnesses the first flickers of the French Revolution, or recounting the world of a Virginia plantation, they've done their homework. Indeed, their fidelity to history can be excessive: so many Virginia cousins, scandals, and disinheritances can weary the reader, especially when the prose takes a sappy turn (“Watching him struggle against undeserved abuse from such a villain made me forgive him, truly”). Patsy marries her cousin Tom Randolph and bears him 11 children while enduring his abuse, but she remains most devoted to maintaining her father’s happiness, property, and legacy.
A thorough and well-researched if sometimes flowery saga of the Jefferson family.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234726-8
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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