Though written for a young-adult audience, this warm, charming novel's message about the healing and transformative power of...
Lyrical, fact-based fiction tracing the incremental liberation of a musically gifted Venetian girl.
Italy in the mid-1700s provides the lush, historical backdrop for the coming-of-age of Viva, 19, who was orphaned as a baby at the Ospedale de Maria della Pietã, a Catholic charity home for girls renowned for their dazzling, disciplined choir performances. But Viva is restless and knows the home sequesters its girls right into adulthood with little opportunity to leave the property independently and uncover "the distant and impossible." Viva resorts to escaping to the school's rooftop to dream of one day leaving the orphanage's confines to write musical compositions, a pastime that is forbidden to the girls at the home. While instructing younger students makes up a good portion of her days, Viva takes a Venetian governor's reticent daughter named Angelica under her wing and then becomes naturally maternal to Emilie, the latest tiny orphan to be left on the orphanage's doorstep, a baby whom she believes holds musical intuition. When intrepid, enterprising Swiss ambassador Jean-Jacques Rousseau arrives, he is instantly enamored of Viva and prearranges a secret escape and elopement for Angelica and her new beau, Abate Casanova. As the grand Easter celebration nears, Viva is in love and her immense talents blossom and begin to become recognized, but Emilie's mysterious origins sets off a disastrous chain of events. Slim in length yet eloquently written, Meyer's strength lies in the story's descriptive characterization: "Viva-the-Alto" makes for an engaging, virtuous protagonist with her fiery red hair framing a face grotesquely scarred by smallpox; her fellow students, some brash and catty, others timid and fearful, are a vivid and authentic supporting cast. Concluding historical notes (with photographs) afford an interesting look into ospedale life.
Though written for a young-adult audience, this warm, charming novel's message about the healing and transformative power of music will appeal to readers of any age.Pub Date: June 20, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4303-2290-0
Page Count: 132
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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