by Posie Graeme-Evans ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 26, 2012
First-rate commercial fiction.
Graeme-Evans (The Dressmaker, 2010, etc.) intertwines two adventures separated by more than a millennium.
Grad student Freya Dane inherits Findnar, an island off the northeastern Scottish coast, from her father, Michael, an archaeologist who left Australia and her mother years ago. Arriving on the island, she finds a letter left by Michael, who tells her he had been excavating in the stone circle that stands on Findnar alongside the ruins of an abbey. “There are riddles in this place that I have never solved,” the letter continues, “I must ask you to help me, though I have no right.” It’s soon apparent that these riddles concern the parallel narrative of Signy, who comes to Findnar from the mainland to perform a sacrifice, despite the hostility of the island’s Christian newcomers, who object to pagan rites near their church. Freya begins digging while improving on an initially uneasy relationship with Daniel Boyne, a fisherman still guilty about the fact that Michael died while rescuing him from drowning. Signy sees Findnar sacked by Viking raiders and is rescued by a kindly nun, as is a near-dead boy who was one of the raiders. Graeme-Evans unfolds separate but equally compelling dramas as Signy falls in love with the wounded raider, with disastrous consequences, and Freya and Daniel are drawn together by unnerving shared visions of the long-ago tragedy. The semi-supernatural way the modern protagonists uncover the mysteries of the past isn’t terribly plausible (or necessary), but the storytelling is so strong, the characters so engaging, that most readers won't care. Freya, longing to connect with the dead father whose absence has always haunted her romantic relationships, and Signy, resolute and defiant under the most terrible circumstances, are surrounded by a vivid supporting cast, including starchy librarian Katherine MacAllister, who was Michael’s lover, and glib-but-not-so-bad architect Simon Fettler. The conclusion of Signy’s saga is dark indeed, so it’s a relief that Graeme-Evans lets Freya have a happy ending.
First-rate commercial fiction.Pub Date: June 26, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9443-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012
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by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000
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
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