A smart and uplifting tale of personal and musical renewal; an impressive debut.
Tragedy puts a young flutist on a new and challenging path.
When readers first meet Elizabeth Morgan, the main character in Minger’s first novel, she’s a promising young classical flute player with plenty of talent and even more ambition. She dreams of the limelight even though she knows that the spotlight seldom shines on wind instrument virtuosos. Her stepmother, “Madly,” is a successful art connoisseur, and her father, David, has published “five lavish collections of photography in the last fourteen years.” But the parental influence of most lasting import in the tale is posthumous: Liz’s mother, Margaret, who gave up a much-admired career as an opera singer when she became a mother (as Minger prettily puts it: “The next year Margaret Moran had handed her career back to the gods who had bestowed it upon her, and Liz had been born”). Liz is consumed by her hunger for fame, but her dreams are destroyed when she’s involved in a horrific car crash and her hands are injured. Despite “artificial joints, reconstructed tendons, grafted nerves,” the damage won't heal completely, and Liz is forced to contemplate a life without flute playing. It doesn’t soften her flinty personality—Minger does a very subtle and remarkable job of creating a pitiable protagonist without making her sympathetic—nor does it long quash her drive, which resurfaces, now attached to following in her mother’s footsteps and entering the opera world. The author describes that sphere and its outsized personalities with fluid readability, handling the abundant technical and insider details so naturally that readers should feel educated rather than excluded. Liz moves from America to Wales and auditions for opera productions with a company in Cardiff, where she meets Giles Offeryn, the troupe’s brilliant and charismatic music director. Throughout the book’s expertly paced latter half, the increasing romantic sparks between Liz and Giles alternate with the behind-the-scenes tensions of the soprano facing one demanding stage role after another. The result is a thoroughly adult-feeling romance plot with an unforgettable main character set in an absorbingly realized world of performance art.
A smart and uplifting tale of personal and musical renewal; an impressive debut.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63152-093-8
Page Count: 376
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.
Tremendous in scope—tremendous in depth of penetration—and as different a Steinbeck as the Steinbeck of Burning Bright was from the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath.
Here is no saga of the underprivileged—no drama of social significance. Tenderness, which some felt was inherent in everything Steinbeck wrote, is muted almost to the vanishing point in this story of conflict within character, impact of character on character, of circumstances on personalities, of the difficult acceptance of individual choice as against the dominance of inherited traits. The philosophy is intimately interwoven with the pace of story, as he follows-from New England to California over some fifty odd years-the two families which hold stage center. There are the Trasks, brothers in two generations, strangely linked, strangely at war the one with the other; there are the Hamiltons (John Steinbeck's own forebears), a unique Irish born couple, the man an odd lovable sort of genius who never capitalizes on his ideas for himself, the tiny wife, tart, cold-and revealing now and again unexpected gentleness of spirit, the burgeoning family, as varied a tribe as could be found. And- on the periphery but integral to the deepening philosophy which motivates the story, there is the wise Chinese servant scholar and gentleman, who submerges his own goals to identify himself wholly with the needs of the desolate Adam Trask, crushed by his soulless wife's desertion, and the twin boys, Cal, violent, moody, basically strong enough to be himself—and Aron, gentle, unwilling to face disagreeable facts, beloved by all who met him. In counterpoint, the story follows too the murky career of Adam's wife, Cathy—who came to him from a mysteriously clouded past, and returned to a role for which she was suited—as a costly whore, and later as Madame in Salinas most corrupt "house," where the perversions of sex ridden males were catered to—and cruelty capitalized upon.Shock techniques applied with rapier and not bludgeon will rule the book out for the tender-skinned.
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1952
ISBN: 0142004235
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1952
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
