A lightly fictionalized account of the first Jesuit in China that informs but fails to enthrall.
A historical novel dramatizes the life and work of a Roman Catholic missionary.
Born in the mid-16th century to a wealthy family in the Italian town of Macerata, Matteo Ricci receives a classical education from his beloved tutor, Father Niccolò Bencivegni. One day, while still a boy, Matteo learns that the priest will be leaving Macerata for Rome in order to join an exciting new religious order: the Society of Jesus. “Just before you were born, Matteo,” Bencivegni explains of the order’s co-founder, “a Christian missionary from Spain named Francis Xavier wanted very much to show the people of China the virtues of becoming Christian. But he became sick and died before he could even try.” When he reaches adulthood, Matteo joins the society—also known as the Jesuits—himself, much to the consternation of his parents. Matteo develops a fascination for cartography and dreams of becoming a missionary in the still mysterious Far East. His wish is made a reality when the society sends him to India and eventually China, where he will attempt to fulfill the dream of Xavier. But to truly bring Christianity to China, Matteo will have to find a way to meet the emperor by gaining entrance to the Forbidden City—the imperial palace that no European has ever visited before. Gregory’s (God’s Messenger, 2017) narration possesses a fablelike quality that makes the whole novel feel like an elongated bedtime story: “Deep within the strange lands and customs of China, the Jesuits found comfort in their familiar routine of prayer and meditation. Naturally they spoke Italian among themselves and sang simple hymns in Latin.” By presenting Ricci’s work as a quest to realize the dream of Xavier, the author provides a simple but effective arc to the priest’s life. As is usual for the Mentoris Project series—which focuses on notable Italians and Italian Americans—the author takes a singularly positive view of her subject, which flattens Ricci a bit as a character. The book doesn’t quite satisfy as true fiction—at least not for adults—but the tale will teach readers a lot about Ricci and the Jesuit mission in China.
A lightly fictionalized account of the first Jesuit in China that informs but fails to enthrall.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-947431-23-2
Page Count: 178
Publisher: Barbera Foundation, Inc.
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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