Duncker gets the high melodrama and pedagogy of a Victorian novel right but does not achieve the contemporary distance that...
Scandalous novelist George Eliot throws 1870s Berlin society into a tizzy in Duncker’s (The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge, 2010, etc.) Victorian roman à clef.
Feckless Max Duncker (not a coincidental surname) is assigned by his older brother and publishing partner to get the pseudonymous Middlemarch author (referred to by the authorial Duncker only as “Mrs. Lewes” or “the Sybil”) to sign their contract. Simultaneously, the elder Duncker is arranging a marriage between rakish Max and the young countess Sophie von Hahn, who is rich, spirited, and a die-hard Eliot fangirl. During negotiations, the Sybil accidentally seduces Max through her relentless pedantry about the Roman writer Lucian. Between visits to her parlor, he slouches through the pleasure city of Homburg, Berlin salons, and the German forests in set pieces that put the author’s deep knowledge of 19th-century society to good use. Sophie resents the restrictions of her class and gender, but when her beloved, bejowled author meddles in her engagement, she becomes enraged by the Sibyl’s influence on Max. This love triangle relies on the reader being convinced of two things: Max and Sophie’s love for each other and men's magnetic attraction to the Sibyl. Unfortunately, Duncker tends to declare emotional truths without shoring them up, such as the very pinnacle of Max and the Sibyl’s intimacy: “Something intangible in her company lifted him up from the swamps of his own selfishness. He vowed he would never visit a prostitute or gamble at the tables again.” Additionally, if the reader does not share Duncker’s fascination with the moralizing writer, the narrator’s frequent interruptions of the period piece with commentary and scholarly analysis become tedious.
Duncker gets the high melodrama and pedagogy of a Victorian novel right but does not achieve the contemporary distance that has made other neo-Victorian tales so delectable.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63286-064-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Ernest Hemingway, who met Markham on safari two years before her Atlantic crossing, tagged her as “a high-grade bitch” but...
A full-throttle dive into the psyche and romantic attachments of Beryl Markham—whose 1936 solo flight across the Atlantic in a two-seater prop plane (carrying emergency fuel in the extra seat) transfixed the world.
As conceived in this second historical by novelist McLain (The Paris Wife, 2011, etc.), Markham—nee Beryl Clutterbuck—is the neglected daughter of an impecunious racehorse trainer who fails to make a go at farming in British East Africa and a feckless, squeamish mother who bolts back to England with their older son. Set on her own two feet early, she is barely schooled but precociously brave and wired for physical challenges—a trait honed by her childhood companion Kibii (a lifelong friend and son of a local chief). In the Mau forest—“before Kenya was Kenya”—she finds a “heaven fitted exactly to me.” Keeping poised around large mammals (a leopard and a lion also figure significantly) is in her blood and later gains her credibility at the racecourse in Nairobi, where she becomes the youngest trainer ever licensed. Statuesque, blonde, and carrying an air of self-sufficiency—she marries, disastrously, at 16 but is granted a separation to train Lord Delamere’s bloodstock—Beryl turns heads among the cheerfully doped and dissolute Muthaiga Club set (“I don’t know what it is about Africa, but champagne is absolutely compulsory here”), charms not one but two heirs to the British crown at Baroness Karen Blixen’s soiree, and sets her cap on Blixen’s lover, Denys Fitch Hatton. She’ll have him, too, and much enjoyment derives from guessing how that script, and other intrigues, will play out in McLain’s retelling. Fittingly, McLain has Markham tell her story from an altitude of 1,800 feet: “I’m meant to do this,” she begins, “stitch my name on the sky.” Popularly regarded as “a kind of Circe” (to quote Isak Dinesen biographer Judith Thurman), the young woman McLain explores owns her mistakes (at least privately) and is more boxed in by class, gender assumptions, and self-doubt than her reputation as aviatrix, big game hunter, and femme fatale suggests.
Ernest Hemingway, who met Markham on safari two years before her Atlantic crossing, tagged her as “a high-grade bitch” but proclaimed her 1942 memoir West with the Night “bloody wonderful.” Readers might even say the same of McLain’s sparkling prose and sympathetic reimagining.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53418-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PROFILES
Uneasy mix of escapism and medical soap opera.
Another Nantucket beach read from Hildebrand (Nantucket Nights, 2001), this one set in a fabulous ocean-side restaurant where the heroine’s frothy romance competes with the specter of cystic fibrosis.
Adrienne Dealey arrives in Nantucket from Aspen, having drifted from one resort hotel job to another for the last eight years. Despite a complete lack of restaurant experience, debonair Thatcher Smith immediately hires her as his assistant manager at the eponymous Blue Bistro, which he owns with chef Fiona Kemp and which will shut its doors for good after this final summer season. Adrienne moves in with a friendly waitress, buys some new hostess outfits and proves a fast learner of the ins and outs of the restaurant business, her success aided by her natural good looks. Hildebrand introduces lots of mouthwatering food and keeps the champagne flowing for the not terribly colorful cast of customers and staff—the unhappy married couple, the studly bartender, the lonely rich guy, the ambitious pastry chef. The inevitable romance between Adrienne and Thatch is complicated by Thatch’s devotion to Fiona, with whom he eats dinner every night after the restaurant closes. And, frankly, in a charisma contest, Fiona in her apron would win over Adrienne in her designer frocks hands down. A graduate of the Culinary Institute, petite, fierce-eyed Fiona is a brilliant chef who could be a star on the Cooking Channel, but she avoids all publicity and never leaves her kitchen. Gradually, Adrienne realizes that Fiona is sick, a secret that must be kept so that diners aren’t frightened away. As the summer winds down, Adrienne and Thatch find themselves deeply in love, but Thatch’s devotion to the devoutly Catholic Fiona, who has her own married lover, never waivers, and he marries her in a hospital ceremony just before her death. Not to worry: now he’s an available widower.
Uneasy mix of escapism and medical soap opera.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-31953-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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