Great fun for any century.
A quick-witted prostitute in 19th-century Copenhagen finds love in 21st-century London.
Charlotte Schleswig has many survival skills, which is a good thing. Since she ran away from the orphanage, she has been supporting herself and Fru Schleswig, the slovenly, illiterate cook who followed her, claiming to be her mother. (Charlotte doesn’t believe her.) Nonetheless, she does what she must to keep a roof over their heads, and she keeps watch for blackmail opportunities and other better money-making schemes. When the pompous widow Fru Krak advertises for a maid, Charlotte applies. Fru Krak instructs Charlotte (who negotiates the position for herself and Fru Schleswig) to make her house presentable for her intended, a Parson, but never to enter the basement . . . which is where Charlotte goes at the first chance. There she finds a strange contraption rumored to be a Suicide Machine. Before he disappeared, Fru Krak’s husband, professor Herr Krak, is said to have offered trips to the “great beyond.” And although his ghost has been spied around the city, his body has never been found. Charlotte investigates, but the hapless Fru Schleswig intervenes, and suddenly the two of them find themselves in 21st-century London. Professor Krak and a group of other displaced Dutch citizens greet them. After introducing Charlotte and Fru Schleswig to the wonders of modern times—Fru Schleswig is particularly taken with the vacuum cleaner—they enlist Charlotte to travel back to Copenhagen and help them protect the time machine from Fru Krak, who will surely destroy it before her impending marriage, cutting off their opportunity to ever return. Charlotte hopes to profit from happenstance, until she unexpectedly falls in love with a Scottish archaeologist—who thinks she is Croatian. She has a wee bit of explaining to do. Jensen (The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, 2005, etc.) has created a marvelous heroine in Charlotte, whose agile mind and love/hate relationship with the doltish Fru Schleswig give this Time and Again–esque love story a comic spin.
Great fun for any century.Pub Date: July 11, 2006
ISBN: 1-59691-188-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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