Silly and sugary stuff. Could better have been packaged as a greeting card of one kind or another.
The French author’s second to appear here (after Snow, 2003), said to be a success in Europe, is a small little tidbit of Hallmarkiana about a musician who lives—and dies—during the Napoleonic era.
Johannes Karelsky, born in 1764, becomes a violinist at age five, after hearing a traveling gypsy’s performance. A child prodigy, two years later he begins performing, soon doing so in all the European courts, acclaimed as “a great violinist, because the music he played came not from his hands but from his heart.” Well, maybe so. Things begin to pale, though, his career stalls, he ages, and, at 31, in 1796, he gets called up for military duty and finds himself a part of Napoleon’s Italian campaign. Desperately wounded on the battlefield and left to die, he’s visited by a mysterious woman—real or imaginary we’ll never know—who gives him water and then sings to him though the night. Could this fateful encounter (he survives!) be an omen in some way related to his driving lifelong desire to compose “the most beautiful opera ever written”? Gee, maybe so. Because he’s been so badly wounded, Johannes is left behind in Venice on desk duty when the rest of the army moves northward—and he’s billeted in the house of one Erasmus, a man without a family who’s a maker of—yes—violins! (“My real homeland is music,” says Erasmus. “I don’t care that much about the rest”). Will Johannes reveal to Erasmus that he himself is a great violinist? (Yes.) Will he have other semi-mystical experiences regarding music, his opera, and the mysterious black violin that hangs on the wall of Erasmus’s workshop? (Yes, yes, and yes.) Will he—gasp—actually compose his brilliant opera? Well, we’re not telling. Read and find out for yourself (it won’t take long).
Silly and sugary stuff. Could better have been packaged as a greeting card of one kind or another.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-5685-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
Despite getting a little preachy toward the end, Leary has largely achieved a genuinely funny novel about alcoholism.
A supposedly recovering alcoholic real estate agent tells her not-exactly-trustworthy version of life in her small New England town in this tragicomic novel by Leary (Outtakes from a Marriage, 2008, etc.).
Sixty-year-old Hildy Good, a divorced realtor who has lived all her life in Wendover on the Massachusetts North Shore, proudly points to having an ancestor burned at the stake at the Salem witch trials. In fact, her party trick is to do psychic readings using subtle suggestions and observational skills honed by selling homes. At first, the novel seems to center on Hildy’s insights about her Wendover neighbors, particularly her recent client Rebecca McAllister, a high-strung young woman who has moved into a local mansion with her businessman husband and two adopted sons. Hildy witnesses Rebecca having trouble fitting in with other mothers, visiting the local psychiatrist Peter Newbold, who rents an office above Hildy’s, and winning a local horse show on her expensive new mount. Hildy is acerbically funny and insightful about her neighbors; many, like her, are from old families whose wealth has evaporated. She becomes Rebecca’s confidante about the affair Rebecca is having with Peter, whom Hildy helped baby-sit when he was a lonely child. She helps another family who needs to sell their house to afford schooling for their special needs child. She begins an affair with local handyman Frankie Getchell, with whom she had a torrid romance as a teenager. But Hildy, who has recently spent a stint in rehab and joined AA after an intervention by her grown daughters, is not quite the jolly eccentric she appears. There are those glasses of wine she drinks alone at night, those morning headaches and memory lapses that are increasing in frequency. As both Rebecca’s and Hildy’s lives spin out of control, the tone darkens until it approaches tragedy. Throughout, Hildy is original, irresistibly likable and thoroughly untrustworthy.
Despite getting a little preachy toward the end, Leary has largely achieved a genuinely funny novel about alcoholism.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-01554-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Hilderbrand’s portrait of the upper-crust Tate clan through the years is so deliciously addictive that it will be the “It”...
Queen of the summer novel—how could she not be, with all her stories set on an island—Hilderbrand delivers a beguiling ninth (The Castaways, 2009, etc.), featuring romance and mystery on isolated Tuckernuck Island.
The Tate family has had a house on Tuckernuck (just off the coast of swanky Nantucket) for generations. It has been empty for years, but now Birdie wants to spend a quiet mother-daughter week there with Chess before Chess’s wedding to Michael Morgan. Then the unthinkable happens—perfect Chess (beautiful, rich, well-bred food editor of Glamorous Home) dumps the equally perfect Michael. She quits her job, leaves her New York apartment for Birdie’s home in New Canaan, and all without explanation. Then the unraveling continues: Michael dies in a rock-climbing accident, leaving Chess not quite a widow, but devastated, guilty, unreachable in the shell of herself. Birdie invites her younger daughter Tate (a pretty, naïve computer genius) and her own bohemian sister India, whose husband, world-renowned sculptor Bill Bishop, killed himself years ago, to Tuckernuck for the month of July, in the hopes that the three of them can break through to Chess. Hunky Barrett Lee is their caretaker, coming from Nantucket twice a day to bring groceries and take away laundry (idyllic Tuckernuck is remote—no phone, no hot water, no ferry) as he’s also inspiring renewed lust in Tate, who has had a crush on him since she was a kid. The author jumps between the four women—Tate and her blossoming relationship with Barrett, India and her relationship with Lula Simpson, a painter at the Academy where India is a curator, Birdie, who is surprised by the recent kindnesses of ex-husband Grant, and finally Chess, who in her journal is uncoiling the sordid, sad circumstances of her break with normal life and Michael’s death.
Hilderbrand’s portrait of the upper-crust Tate clan through the years is so deliciously addictive that it will be the “It” beach book of the summer.Pub Date: July 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-316-04387-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
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