By the author of many, many historical novels (and also grim little sagas of concentrated familial nastiness like Vollands, p. 625): a view of the strenuous career of Marie de Guise of France, mother of Mary, Queen of Scots, born in 1587, six days before the death of her father, James V. The fictional narrator here is Claudine de Vouvray, resilient and feisty, who is happy to accompany her beloved half-sister Marie de Guise (neither illegitimate Claudine nor Marie ever publicly acknowledges the relationship) to Scotland, where the widowed Marie will be the queen of James V, the dangerously volatile victim of a punishing childhood. The pair accommodate, however, and both are overjoyed when two sons are born—and devastated when the babies die. Their deaths—plus the defeats by the ever-invading English- -destroy the King, and he dies after the birth of Mary. It's then that Marie de Guise begins her perilous rule among powerful neighboring and internal combatants—royals, religious (the ``reformers'' led by John Knox are on the march) and Scottish chiefs and landholders. Through it all—edgy chamber diplomacy, journeys, wars, and horrid deaths—Claudine is Marie's loyal confidante, though she's been driven forth once, after it was obvious that she was carrying one of James V's many bastards. Eventually, Claudine's adventures in love and marriage and rudimentary survival end in France, but Queen Marie dies in Scotland, fighting to the last to preserve the Scottish crown. Hill's conscientious monitoring of the heels and deals can be a rough slog (the snarl of names and multitudinous feuds is formidable), but Claudine and her adventures offer some relief, and this is a plausible portrait of a Queen and her harsh and dismal battle to secure a throne to which her daughter Mary would return to be Scotland's last monarch.
Pub Date: Feb. 11, 1992
ISBN: 0-312-07091-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1991
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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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