A clever, riveting, and multifaceted tale about sailing, so vivid that readers should taste the salt spray.
A debut historical novel captures life on the ocean waves in the late 19th century.
For the uninitiated, a downeaster is a fast, medium-size clipper ship, designed to carry cargo. The year is 1872, and the downeaster featured here is The Providence, anchored in Bath, Maine. The captain of the ship is Isaac Griffin, one of the tale’s three central characters. Griffin, a man down on his luck, faces a choice: bankruptcy or the financially beneficial yet desperately perilous journey around Cape Horn. To complicate matters, a fire severely burned his hand during a previous voyage (“pain shrieked from the damaged tendons and injured nerve endings”). The opening of the story points to a classic “Horn run” adventure with storms, curses, and sea shanties aplenty. On this front, the storyline does not disappoint, yet it is further bolstered by the author’s fastidious charting of his characters’ psychological development. With regard to Nicholas Priest in particular, the novel develops into a well-wrought bildungsroman. A victim of a brutal hazing at his boarding school, where he was tied to a tree in the freezing cold, the young Nicholas is first seen at the elbow of his father, weak and with breathing difficulties. His father’s kill-or-cure solution for him turns out to be a sea voyage. Nicholas’ personal journey into manhood, punctuated by courageousness and healing, becomes one of the most vivid strands in an elaborately woven narrative. The third, yet by no means least important, of the three central characters is the green-eyed nurse Kayleigh MacKenna. MacKenna’s story, a refreshing addition, allows the author to explore 19th-century women’s rights and attempts to perceive the era from a female aesthetic. How each of these distinct narrative threads becomes interwoven is part of the joy of reading this witty, vigorous book. In terms of style, each sentence, elegantly composed, embodies sufficient ruggedness to capture the fervor of a life spent at sea: “The wind had been steady and brisk from southwest and south. Large waves crested with white foam rolled atop sides carved rough with gouges. These made Providence behave like a young stallion racing, absorbed and satisfied by the joy of its own physicality.” Inspired by the close scrutiny of ships’ logs of the age, this historically accurate, engrossing account will likely appeal to seasoned seadogs and landlubbers alike.
A clever, riveting, and multifaceted tale about sailing, so vivid that readers should taste the salt spray.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61179-331-4
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Fireship Press
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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