Sargent (science fiction: Shore of Women; Venus of Shadows; espionage: Black Valentine) now turns her hand to the epic of Genghis Khan—as experienced by some of the innumerable women in the Khan's life. Yesugei, a Mongolian tribal chief, abducts Hoelun during her wedding journey, and together they engender Temujin, the military genius who will become Genghis Khan. Several years later, Yesugei dies, leaving Hoelun and her young family unprotected. Defenseless, they're expelled from the tribe, and Temujin is enslaved by yet another Mongolian tribe. Khadagan, a smart girl, helps him escape, however, and—many pages later—Temujin marries wife #1, Bortai, who provides him with the first of his warriors and who is later stolen from him as Hoelun was stolen from her first husband. Chilgar will father Bortai's first son, Jochi, whom Temujin accepts as his own when he steals Bortai back. Then, as a wealthy and successful warlord, Temujin begins a trajectory of marriages almost impossible to synopsize. They don't seem to influence the Khan's actions either in private or in public—as abductions, family and tribal hatreds, drunken orgies, marriages, and raids repeat like phrases on a scratched record, all sounding alike. The internecine rivalries defy comprehension, the battles are dull, and the sex scenes fall limp throughout 700 pages of repetitious, plodding prose.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-517-57364-4
Page Count: 710
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
McBride presents an interesting experiment in point of view here, as all of Brown’s activities are filtered through the eyes...
In McBride’s version of events, John Brown’s body doesn’t lie a-mouldering in the grave—he’s alive and vigorous and fanatical and doomed, so one could say his soul does indeed go marching on.
The unlikely narrator of the events leading up to Brown’s quixotic raid at Harpers Ferry is Henry Shackleford, aka Little Onion, whose father is killed when Brown comes in to liberate some slaves. Brown whisks the 12-year-old away thinking he’s a girl, and Onion keeps up the disguise for the next few years. This fluidity of gender identity allows Onion a certain leeway in his life, for example, he gets taken in by Pie, a beautiful prostitute, where he witnesses some activity almost more unseemly than a 12-year-old can stand. The interlude with Pie occurs during a two-year period where Brown disappears from Onion’s life, but they’re reunited a few months before the debacle at Harpers Ferry. In that time, Brown visits Frederick Douglass, and, in the most implausible scene in the novel, Douglass gets tight and chases after the nubile Onion. The stakes are raised as Brown approaches October 1859, for even Onion recognizes the futility of the raid, where Brown expects hundreds of slaves to rise in revolt and gets only a handful. Onion notes that Brown’s fanaticism increasingly approaches “lunacy” as the time for the raid gets closer, and Brown never loses that obsessive glint in his eye that tells him he’s doing the Lord’s work. At the end, Onion reasserts his identity as a male and escapes just before Brown’s execution.
McBride presents an interesting experiment in point of view here, as all of Brown’s activities are filtered through the eyes of a young adolescent who wavers between innocence and cynicism.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59448-634-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Touching and inspirational.
A scarf ties together the stories of two women as they struggle with personal journeys 100 years apart in Meissner’s historical novel (The Girl in the Glass, 2012, etc.).
In 1911, Clara Wood witnesses the traumatic death of the man she loves in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and chooses to bury her grief and guilt while ministering to sick immigrants on Ellis Island. The hospital’s remote and insulated from the rest of New York City, and she refuses travel to the mainland, even on her days off. Then an emigrant Welshman wrapped in his deceased wife’s distinctive marigold scarf arrives, and Clara finds herself reaching beyond her normal duties to help the quarantined man. The truths she uncovers about his wife trigger reflections about ethical decisions and compel her to examine her own convictions about life and a person’s capacity to love, as a colleague tries to help her. Gently interwoven into Clara’s tale is the story of widow Taryn Michaels, whose life 100 years later in some ways parallels Clara’s. Taryn works in a tony fabric shop, raises her daughter in the apartment above and does her best to avoid the overwhelming emotions she’s felt since she stood across the street from the World Trade Center and witnessed the destruction as the first tower crumbled. A recently discovered photo from that day is published in a national magazine and now, 10 years after 9/11, Taryn is forced to relive the events and face the guilt she’s harbored because she acceded to a customer’s request and stopped by a hotel to pick up a marigold scarf, an action that delayed Taryn from joining her husband at Windows on the World for a celebration she’d planned. Meissner is a practiced writer whose two main characters cope with universal themes that many people deal with: loss, survivor’s guilt, and permitting oneself to move on and achieve happiness again. Although their stories are unbalanced—Clara’s account dominates the narrative—the author creates two sympathetic, relatable characters that readers will applaud.
Touching and inspirational.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-451-41991-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: New American Library
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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