A complex story laid out with consummate skill and aimed directly at the powerful vortex where emotion and politics converge.
In a carefully researched first outing, Delahunt tells the story of Trotsky’s wait in a fortified Mexico City house for the arrival of Stalin’s assassins.
One of the brightest firebrands of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky (born Lev Davidovich) was drummed out of the country by his jealous enemy, Stalin, and now, amid a swirl of memories—of love, betrayal, and revolution—the last days of the revolutionst are related in a series of impressionistic pieces, some narrated by Trotsky himself, others by people who knew him. The timespan goes from Trotsky’s Ukrainian childhood in the late-19th century all the way up to the 1950s, years after his death, when the man who ordered his assassination, Joseph Stalin, lies dying in Moscow. The story begins with a recollection of his arrival in Mexico City, where he and his wife stayed with the flamboyantly emotional and political couple Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Along the way we hear from Trotsky’s farmer father; his wife; one of his bodyguards; the Soviet operative infiltrating Trotsky’s compound; a Mexican artist; Trotsky himself; and others. Delahunt’s command of her vast subject is most impressive indeed as she darts about from lazy days in Mexico City to the frozen steppes of Russia during the Civil War to the conspiracy-cloaked corridors of power in Moscow—all without batting an eye or even once muddying the narrative. The depth of research is astounding in a mapping-out of the volcanic passions and dark evils of the Revolution’s heroes and villains—especially Stalin’s near-Satanic henchman Beria.
A complex story laid out with consummate skill and aimed directly at the powerful vortex where emotion and politics converge.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-29106-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
Original and earnest, informed both by human limitation and human potential.
The author returns to the Arkansas setting of They Tell Me of a Home (2005).
It’s 1941, and Gustavus and Emma Jean Peace have just had their seventh child. Gus had hoped to be through having babies. Emma Jean—disappointed with six boys—is determined to try one last time for a girl. When God doesn’t give her a daughter, she decides to make one herself. Naming the new baby “Perfect” and blackmailing the midwife to aid her in her desperate deception, Emma Jean announces the birth of a girl. For eight years, Emma Jean outfits her youngest child in pretty dresses, gives her all the indulgences she longed for in her own blighted girlhood and hides the truth from everyone—even herself. But when the truth comes out, Emma Jean is a pariah and her most-treasured child becomes a freak. It’s hard to know quite what to make of this impassioned, imperfect novel. While another writer might have chosen to complement the sensationalism of his scenario with a tempered style, Black narrates his tale in the key of melodrama. He devotes a considerable number of pages to Emma Jean’s experience as the unloved, darker (and therefore ugly) daughter, but since no amount of back story can justify Emma-Jean’s actions, these passages become redundant. And, most crucially, Black builds toward the point when Perfect discovers that she’s a boy, but seems confused about what to do with his character after this astonishing revelation. At the same time, the author offers a nuanced portrait of an insular community’s capacity to absorb difference, and it’s a cold reader who will be unmoved by his depictions.
Original and earnest, informed both by human limitation and human potential.Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-58267-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
Part of Hoffman's great talent is her wonderful ability to sift some magic into unlikely places, such as a latter-day Levittown (Seventh Heaven, 1990) or a community of divorcÇes in Florida (Turtle Moon, 1992). But in her 11th novel, a tale of love and life in New England, it feels as if the lid flew off the jar of magic—it blinds you with fairy dust. Sally and Gillian Owens are orphaned sisters, only 13 months apart, but such opposites in appearance and temperament that they're dubbed ``Day and Night'' by the two old aunts who are raising them. Sally is steady, Gillian is jittery, and each is wary, in her own way, about the frightening pull of love. They've seen the evidence for themselves in the besotted behavior of the women who call on the two aunts for charms and potions to help them with their love lives. The aunts grow herbs, make mysterious brews, and have a houseful of—what else?—black cats. The two girls grow up to flee (in opposite directions) from the aunts, the house, and the Massachusetts town where they've long been shunned by their superstitious schoolmates. What they can't escape is magic, which follows them, sometimes in a particularly malevolent form. And, ultimately, no matter how hard they dodge it, they have to recognize that love always catches up with you. As always, Hoffman's writing has plenty of power. Her best sentences are like incantations—they won't let you get away. But it's just too hard to believe the magic here, maybe because it's not so much practical magic as it is predictable magic, with its crones and bubbling cauldrons and hearts of animals pierced with pins. Sally and Gillian are appealing characters, but, finally, their story seems as murky as one of the aunts' potions—and just as hard to swallow. Too much hocus-pocus, not enough focus. (Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: June 14, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-14055-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
BOOK TO SCREEN
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