A debut historical novel about fortunes made and lost during the silver rush of the 1850s.
McGranahan’s story is set in San Francisco and Virginia City, Nevada, in 1854, covering the first major silver ore discovery in the United States, known as the Comstock Lode. The author retells history from the perspective of William Ralston––one of the most influential financiers of the period. Ralston falls in love with Louisa Thorn, a wealthy debutante, and together, they dream of transforming San Francisco into the most beautiful city in the world. However, Louisa dies suddenly before they can marry. Driven by his love for her, Ralston decides to transform San Francisco as a banker. He marries a woman named Elizabeth (who promises to help him forget about Louisa) and founds the California Bank, where he becomes the financier for the Comstock project. Water in the mines slows production, but Prussian engineer Adolph Sutro offers a solution: build a four-mile tunnel beneath the lode. At first Ralston agrees, but then his partner turns him against the idea, and Sutro spends 10 years seeking support for the tunnel. Betrayals follow, along with political intrigue, fighting between Protestant and Irish-Catholic miners, stock frenzies and bank runs, all while Ralston clings to both his marriage and a street girl named Jessie, who looks just like his deceased fiancee. Will Ralston be able to keep his life together? McGranahan’s character development is superb; readers will truly care about what happens to Ralston and other main figures in the story. However, sometimes the plot loses forward momentum, and at other times, the story advances far too quickly: “Abraham Lincoln was elected president…soon after the Civil War began. The year after that…little Louisa chewed on a matchstick, became ill, and died.” Still, McGranahan’s writing is often evocative, displaying all the hallmarks of fine literature: “Shivering, he nodded to a boy leaning innocently against a lamppost, collar turned up and cap pulled down. The lamplighter nodded back, a little grin creasing his lips.”
An often captivating story about Nevada’s first silver rush, with veins of well-crafted prose, good character development and some solid storytelling.
Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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