An entertaining biographical novel rich in action and period details.
An Italian-born adventurer battles Austrians, Russians, Confederates, and anti-immigrant bigotry in this fictionalized saga of a real-life American hero.
Lamphier (The Great Show, 2017, etc.) novelizes the outlines of Louis Palma di Cesnola’s busy life while imaginatively fleshing out scenes of romance, combat, and trauma. The second son of an Italian count, Cesnola bitterly ships out to military school at the age of 14 in 1846 after his true love marries his older brother, the heir to the family title. His timing is great: He soon enlists in the Sardinian army to join Italy’s war of liberation against the Austrian Empire; he weathers endless boredom in camp punctuated by extreme panic in a saber melee, for which he wins promotion to lieutenant. Cashiered after getting caught in bed with a general’s wife, he finds his way to the Crimean War, where he again sits around in squalid camps but gets in a few wild hours slaughtering Russian soldiers. Then he’s off to New York under the Americanized name Louis P. di Cesnola to wed heiress Mary Reid and join the Union Army as a cavalry colonel in the Civil War. Many battles with Confederate cavalry genius Jeb Stuart ensue until Cesnola is captured. His story turns dark and harrowing as he and his fellow POWs face death from disease and semistarvation in harsh Confederate camps. Cesnola survives and, after the war, serves as U.S. consul in Cyprus, where he turns his hand to archaeology and excavates many ancient artifacts; that new profession eventually lands him the directorship of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The real Cesnola led an iconic 19th-century life, and Lamphier’s energetic novel deftly conveys the dizzying self-reinventions he undertook in that bustling age. Her rousing narrative features much engrossing military and archaeological lore, generous helpings of mayhem (“Parnell slashed at his opponent, sinking his saber deep in the man’s neck”), and a piquant love story, as Cesnola and Mary’s initially pragmatic relationship—she’s lonely; he’s broke—deepens into profound affection. The story’s Italian-American pride theme is sometimes intrusive, with Cesnola quick to blame slights and reversals on anti-Italian prejudice among the WASP establishment. Still, when his blood is up, he’s a plucky, appealing hero.
An entertaining biographical novel rich in action and period details.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-947431-06-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Barbera Foundation
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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