When the secrets behind an intriguing nude portrait trickle out into the open, a photographer and her artist lover must grapple with the fallout in Sisu’s masterful debut.
Photographer Gwen Mason has just opened up her own studio in Miami and hopes to find her niche in the trendy city. Though she lives with her divorcee mother and doesn’t think she’s interested in a relationship, meeting upcoming artist Adam Straker changes all that. Adam’s paintings are causing quite a stir in the art world, and Gwen knows she’s found something special. He might be 20 years her senior, but that doesn’t stop the couple from embarking on a passionate affair. Yet one of Adam’s paintings arouses Gwen’s curiosity like no other; it’s a striking portrait of a nude woman, one Adam keeps hidden and pointedly refuses to discuss. When Adam has the chance to land a spot in a prestigious New York City gallery, Gwen believes the painting will secure his place, and she shows “The Nude” to Adam’s manager without Adam’s knowledge. Though the painting clinches the New York deal, it starts an explosive chain reaction for Adam and Gwen. In the coming weeks, decades-old secrets of destroyed lives and loves, of tragedy and revenge, of greed and madness, are revealed at a cost no one could have foreseen. Sisu nicely ramps up the suspense with her excellent pacing, while her vibrant depiction of the art world breathes energy and authenticity into the narrative. Gwen and Adam’s stormy relationship rings true, though delving into Adam’s point of view earlier would have delivered a more well-balanced story. Gwen’s feistiness and sometimes bad choices make her sympathetic and fully human, and readers will root for her to discover her past and keep her man. But it is Sisu’s analysis of the creative process that forms the heart of this novel; she explores the artistic mentality in all its bizarre and often-misunderstood facets and digs deep into the dark underbelly of creative genius and its unintended consequences. An enthralling first novel.
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2011
ISBN: 978-1465339225
Page Count: 257
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Here, after last year's Of Love and Shadows, the tale of a quirky young woman's rise to influence in an unnamed South American country—with a delightful cast of exotic characters, but without the sure-handed plotting and leisurely grace of Allende's first—and best—book, The House of the Spirits (1985). When little Eva Luna's mother dies, the imaginative child is hired out to a string of eccentric families. During one of her periodic bouts of rebellion, she runs away and makes friends with Huberto Naranjo, a slick little street-kid. Years later, when she's in another bind, he finds her a place to stay in the red-light district—with a cheerful madame, La Senora, whose best friend is Melesio, a transvestite cabaret star. Everything's cozy until a new police sergeant takes over the district and disrupts the accepted system of corruption. Melesio drafts a protesting petition and is packed off to prison, and Eva's out on the street. She meets Riad Halabi, a kind Arab merchant with a cleft lip, who takes pity on her and whisks her away to the backwater village of Agua Santa. There, Eva keeps her savior's sulky wife Zulema company. Zulema commits suicide after a failed extramarital romance, and the previously loyal visitors begin to whisper about the relationship between Riad Halabi and Eva. So Eva departs for the capital—where she meets up with Melesio (now known as Mimi), begins an affair with Huberto Naranjo (now a famous rebel leader), and becomes casually involved in the revolutionary movement. Brimming with hothouse color, amply displayed in Allende's mellifluous prose, but the riot of character and incident here is surface effect; and the action—the mishaps of Eva—is toothless and vague. Lively entertainment, then, with little resonance.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1988
ISBN: 0241951658
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1988
A magical, deeply felt novel that breathes new life into an old genre.
A German teenager whose family moves to Alabama gets a deep-fried Southern gothic education.
Max is gifted, but if you’re thinking “honors student,” think again. He touches dead animals or withered plants and they return to life; whether his power (or curse, as Max thinks of it) works on dead people is part of the story’s suspense. The curse comes with pitfalls: Migraines besiege him after his resurrections, and he craves gobs of sugar. This insightful novel isn’t a fantasy, and Hudson treats Max’s gift as quite real. In addition, Hudson, an Alabama native, memorably evokes her home state, both its beauty and its warped rituals. Max’s father is an engineer, and the car company where he works has transferred him to a factory in Alabama; Max’s parents hope living there will give him a clean break from his troubled love for his dead classmate, Nils. Max is drawn to Pan, a witchy gay boy who wears dresses and believes in auras and incantations. Pan is the only person who knows about Max’s power. But Max also becomes enchanted with the Judge, a classmate's powerful father who’s running for governor and is vociferous about his astringent faith in Christ after an earlier life of sin (it's hard to read the novel and not think of Judge Roy Moore, who ran for U.S. Senate from Alabama, as the Judge’s real-life analogue). The Judge has plans for Max, who feels torn between his love for outcast Pan and the feeling of belonging the Judge provides. But that belonging has clear costs; the Judge likes to test potential believers by dosing them with poison. The real believers survive. Hudson invokes the tropes of Alabama to powerful effect: the bizarre fundamentalism; the religion of football; the cultlike unification of church and state. The tropes run the risk of feeling hackneyed, but this is Southern gothic territory, after all. Hudson brings something new to that terrain: an overt depiction of queer desire, welcome because writers such as Capote’s and McCullers’ depictions of queerness were so occluded.
A magical, deeply felt novel that breathes new life into an old genre.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63149-629-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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