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ADELE

Name: ADELE
Author: Mary Flanagan
ISBN: 0-393-04547-1

by Mary Flanagan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1997

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A highly charged, deeply eroticized historical and contemporary fiction from the American-born English author of two short-story collections and the novels Trust (1988) and Rose Reason (1992). Flanagan writes about women who are impelled by the urgent, often violent emotions they conceal beneath dutiful exteriors, and who are usually disappointed by the men to whom they confide their secrets. There's an identifiable, implicit homage to Henry James in her penetrating analyses of the ways in which women think, feel, and behave differently from men. This novel begins as Celia Pippet (``a snotty middle class sourpuss''), having stolen a scandalous objet d'art from the British Museum, travels to France to learn the truth about eponymous title character Adäle Louisante—a mysterious Parisian beauty whose involvement in a scandalous love affair, 50 years earlier, had led to her even more mysterious death. Accompanied by friends who both share and mistrust her zeal, Celia investigates L'affaire Adäle, striking gold when she meets Adäle's onetime nurse Blanche Jessel (could a character's name be more Jamesian?), whose reluctant memories include her characterization of Paris between the World Wars as ``a sexual theme park.'' Flanagan's tendencies toward garish imagery and runaway melodrama are actually quite successfully concentrated in the thrillingly evoked figure of Jonas Sylvester, a proto-Nazi gynecologist who had imagined the lustrously beautiful Adäle the prototype for a scientifically created perfect race—and whose workmanlike passion for his headstrong Trilby becomes both the making and the breaking of her. Adäle is, alas, far too passive to be fully credible, and Flanagan never gets convincingly inside her mind and feelings (or, indeed, those of any of the novel's characters). Oddly enough, it scarcely matters, for almost everything else works in this expertly fashioned romantic tale. Henry James might have disapproved, but one suspects he would have devoured every page of Adäle with agreeably guilty pleasure.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-393-04547-1

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BLUE WOMAN
by Mary Flanagan

- BOOK REVIEW
ROSE REASON
by Mary Flanagan

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CARRIE

by Stephen King ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 8, 1974

King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
OTHER WORLDS THAN THESE
by Stephen King & Peter Straub

- BOOK REVIEW
NEVER FLINCH
by Stephen King

- BOOK REVIEW
YOU LIKE IT DARKER
by Stephen King

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Carrie Turns 40

- SEEN & HEARD
Stephen King Used ‘Carrie’ Advance To Support Mom

- BOOK TO SCREEN
New ‘Carrie’ Series in the Works at Amazon

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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.