Riley’s exhaustive, and occasionally exhausting, research is on full display here.
In the fourth of Riley’s Seven Sisters series, another of the D’Aplièse daughters discovers her true heritage.
After her sister Star finds herself, Celaeno, aka CeCe, whose career as a painter has stalled, is free to follow the directive left by her late adoptive father, Pa Salt. (Series readers will recall that Pa Salt, a shipping magnate, adopted seven girls as infants, naming them after stars in the Pleiades constellation.) CeCe is instructed to research Kitty Mercer, who lived in Broome, a northwestern Australian town renowned for its pearl fishing industry. After a romantic interlude with an eccentric Bangkok billionaire, CeCe arrives in Australia, where additional clues lead her to the town of Alice Springs and its surrounding desert, the Never Never. There, while discovering her artistic heritage through aboriginal paintings, she learns of a mixed-race man who may be her grandfather. CeCe’s story meshes with sections devoted to Kitty, beginning in 1906. The daughter of a philandering minister, she journeys from Scotland to Australia, where she marries into a German-Australian pearling family, the Mercers, setting up household in Broome with husband Andrew. She gives birth to son Charlie after providing shelter to an aboriginal girl, Camira, and her infant, called Alkina (Moon) but nicknamed Cat for her large amber eyes. Cat and Charlie grow up together and become inseparable. When Charlie reaches adulthood, his determination to wed Cat once more upends Kitty’s destiny. Kitty’s tangled history and its equally snarled connections to CeCe’s origins unravel at a leisurely pace, with much lore about pearl fishing, aboriginal culture, and Australian race relations adding interest.
Riley’s exhaustive, and occasionally exhausting, research is on full display here.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8003-3
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
Another powerful examination of painfully human ambiguities and ambivalences—this gifted writer just keeps getting better.
A radiant collection of stories linked to Strout’s previous novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016, etc.), but moving beyond its first-person narration to limn small-town life from multiple perspectives.
Lucy is long gone from Amgash, Illinois, but her absence looms large; now that she’s a well-known author, the fact that her desperately poor family was despised and outcast has become an uncomfortable memory for the locals, including her damaged brother, Pete, and resentful sister, Vicky. Strout stakes out the collection’s moral terrain in its first story, “The Sign.” Tommy Guptill, who was kind to Lucy when she was a girl, still drops by the ramshackle Barton house to check on Pete even though it’s quite likely that Pete’s father was responsible for the fire that destroyed Tommy’s dairy farm and reduced him to taking a job as a school janitor. Tommy is an extraordinarily good man who took the calamitous fire as a spiritual lesson in what was truly important and has lived by it ever since. Patty Nicely, protagonist of “Windmills,” is another genuinely decent person who returns kindness for cruelty from Vicky’s angry daughter, Lila, who, in addition to viciously insulting Patty, states the jaundiced town wisdom about Lucy: “She thinks she’s better than any of us.” That isn’t so, we see in the story in which Lucy finally visits home (“Sister”), but there are plenty of mean-spirited people in Amgash who like to think so; it excuses their own various forms of uncaring. Class prejudice remains one of Strout’s enduring themes, along with the complex, fraught bonds of family across the generations, and she investigates both with tender yet tough-minded compassion for even the most repulsive characters (Patty’s nasty sister, Linda, and her predatory husband, Jay, in the collection’s creepiest story, “Cracked”). The epic scope within seemingly modest confines recalls Strout’s Pulitzer Prize winner, Olive Kitteridge (2008), and her ability to discern vulnerabilities buried beneath bad behavior is as acute as ever.
Another powerful examination of painfully human ambiguities and ambivalences—this gifted writer just keeps getting better.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8940-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
PERSPECTIVES
A nicely judged fictional resurrection joins the tribute library accumulating around a literary icon.
Sister of the more famous Jane, Cassandra Austen emerges as a figure in her own right, a woman who, although disappointed in love, finds fulfillment in her devotion to her sister, both in her lifetime and beyond.
“Poor, beautiful Miss Austen, condemned to eke out a sad life with nothing to do but care for others and control the temperament of her difficult sister” is the comical opinion of Jane Austen herself on her sister, Cassy, at least according to Hornby (All Together Now, 2015, etc.), whose animation of the close relationship between the siblings is the driving force of her new novel. Denied marriage and children after the death of her fiance, Cassandra becomes a model of duty and self-sacrifice, watching over her family generally and Jane in particular as keeper of the flame and guardian of her reputation. This role will include destroying any evidence detrimental to Jane’s future status, such as letters revealing a fragile, depressive side to her character. It’s on this mission that Cassy, in 1840, decades after her sister’s death, visits the Kintbury vicarage to sift through a stash of Jane’s correspondence. As Cassy reviews these letters, so the story flashes back to earlier episodes—of sisterly delight; of anxiety about the future when the Austens must leave their home after Mr. Austen’s retirement; of trips to Bath and the English coast; of meetings with potential suitors. All this offers Hornby the opportunity to observe the marriage market, women’s lot, and men’s dominion—though with a heavier satirical hand than Jane Austen’s—and also to suggest that members of Austen’s own circle might have inspired some of her characters. Cassy herself never quite convinces and the business of the book can seem scattered, but the evocation of the sisters’ closeness is solid.
A nicely judged fictional resurrection joins the tribute library accumulating around a literary icon.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-25220-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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