A pleasing cross-genre novel.
A novel that mixes Scottish history, an ancient curse, and a hint of romance.
After her fiance breaks up with her via text, Aubrey Cumming finds herself at a loss. After all, she moved from Pennsylvania to the town of Harrington, New Jersey, for him. After a pity party with two of her friends, she returns to work at her bookstore job. There, her Scottish boss, Angus MacKintosh, offers her a trip to Scotland to visit the land of her ancestors and get over her ex. Her boss even found her a place to stay for free, with just one catch—she’ll have to find a way to break a curse placed on the MacKintosh family back in 1442: “none shall be loved truly, but always in vain.” To break it, a Cumming must fall in love with a MacKintosh. In Scotland, Aubrey takes her time enjoying life as a tourist, but it isn’t long before she meets two strapping Scottish gentlemen, Finn Cameron and Connor MacConnach. But in the wake of Brexit, Scotland is still fighting for its independence from the United Kingdom, and the Caledonia First campaign has powerful enemies as well as a traitor in their midst. Author MacKinnon (Whiskey Dreams, 2018, etc.) offers a little something for everyone in this novel, including a love triangle, supernatural elements, political intrigue, dramatic history, and beautiful scenery in a truly epic tale. Aubrey’s time in Scotland is broken up by glimpses of the past, which show how the family curse came about. The well-developed main characters are backed up by a host of entertaining and lovable secondary players. It’s clear the author did her research about the country, history, and landscape, which may cause some readers to do further research, if not book tours of their own. This novel is also highly recommended for fans of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series, as its fans will find many hidden and not-so-hidden references to it in the text.
A pleasing cross-genre novel.Pub Date: March 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73383-840-5
Page Count: 356
Publisher: DartFrog Books
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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