An artful blend of history and romance.
In Penttila’s (A Note of Scandal, 2013, etc.) Regency romance, a young woman struggles to reconcile a tragic past and an uncertain future in a city on the brink of revolt.
Madeline Wetherby is no stranger to hardship. Daughter of an English viscount, she was orphaned as a toddler, rescued from an abusive uncle, and sent away by her godfather, the Earl of Shaftsbury. She’s educated on all things estate related and is promised to marry his heir, Deacon. Unfortunately, the earl, now deceased, kept his plans a secret, and when Maddie shows up at the castle expecting to marry, she finds that Deacon wants nothing to do with her—especially when it’s revealed she wasn’t born a Wetherby. Madeline’s prospects are bleak. She’s been brought up a lady only to learn that her roots are working class. It’s 1819 in Manchester, and she’s without relations to claim her or a husband to protect her. When Deacon’s brother Nash proposes to marry her, in exchange for some money from his brother, she has little choice but to accept. The novel follows the two as they struggle to find love. Set against the backdrop of a turbulent time in British history, Penttila’s novel shines a light on the plights of both women and the workers of England. Maddie’s struggle to find her identity and some measure of independence parallels the struggles of working-class Mancunians; caught between two worlds, belonging fully to neither, she fights to find her voice as the working class fights for theirs through parliamentary reform. History buffs in particular will enjoy exploring the Peterloo Massacre, one of the defining moments of British history, a conflict in which Maddie plays a central role. Though she suffers great loss, she’s ultimately rewarded for challenging social norms. Without overburdening the story, the many details surrounding the massacre provide rich historical context, but romance is still at the novel’s core. Fortunately, led by genuine and engaging Maddie, the story is refreshingly free of overly sappy scenes and heavy-handed descriptions.
An artful blend of history and romance.Pub Date: Dec. 20, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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
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