Not without charm, but too bloated and overheated to be enjoyed as light-hearted fun.
There are Jane Austen fans, and there are Jane Austen spin-off fans. Sometimes they merge, but probably not while reading Berdoll’s bawdy second novel about the Darcys (Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife, 2004).
In 1815, Elizabeth Darcy, née Bennet, gives birth to twins just as Mr. Darcy returns to Pemberley Hall from the battlefield of Waterloo, where he’d gone to rescue his sister Georgiana, who was nursing her beloved cousin Fitzwilliam. Now, deeply wounding Darcy’s sense of propriety, Georgiana confesses that a hasty marriage must be arranged; a weak and befuddled Fitzwilliam obliges only to discover that she has fibbed about her deflowerment, let alone her pregnancy. Elizabeth’s sisters Jane and Lydia have their share of problems as well. Jane’s husband Bingley has strayed, briefly but long enough to father a child. Meanwhile, England’s post-war political and economic woes have endangered his finances. As for Lydia, her wicked husband Wickham is assumed dead on the battlefield. So when she finds herself inconveniently with child, Lydia finds a new husband, the relatively decent Major Kneebone, only to have Wickham reappear. Then there is Darcy’s impossible Aunt Catherine, whose desire to unite the family fortune causes mischief minor and major, bordering on tragic. As for Elizabeth and Darcy, their big drama concerns the frequency and picturesque locales of their connubial relations. Derdoll spares no effort in describing period details, but the tone has little to do with Austen’s restrained understated social commentary. The continual couplings echo 18th-century sexual ribaldry (and 21st-century romance novels) while the plot reads like a Dickens or Thackeray knock off, particularly in the downward spiral of wicked Wickham, whose capacity to bear and desert bastards must set some kind of literary record.
Not without charm, but too bloated and overheated to be enjoyed as light-hearted fun.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-4022-0563-5
Page Count: 436
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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