A modestly intriguing pastime for royalty buffs, though one requiring a certain willing suspension of disbelief.
Another Romanov steps out of the shadows—and this time it appears to be the genuine article.
Himself part of that storied, noble clan (“my grandmother, the grand duchess Olga, was a Romanov”), Prince Michael of Greece (a novel, Sultana, 1983; The Empress of Farewells, 2002, etc.) relates a suitably improbable tale: when he was attending the 1998 funeral of Nicholas and Alexandra and their children, murdered by Bolsheviks 80 years earlier, Michael was enchanted by the presence of a regal, 82-year-old relative with the sturdy name Natalya Androssov Iskander Romanov, who claimed descent from the black sheep of the Romanov family, “Nicholas Konstantinovich, your grandmother Olga’s brother.” Nicholas, according to Natalya—who had survived the Soviet years while working as a motorcycle acrobat—had been stricken from history for having scandalized all Russia with his carryings-on, not least his affair with an American gold-digger named Fanny Lear. Prince Michael brings a certain Barbara Cartlandish sensibility to his invented description of the first encounter between these star-crossed lovers: “It was his mouth that drove Fanny wild with desire. Rather large, with red lips whose curve cast a spell over her, a smile now caressing, now ardent.” The prose toughens up a little when, on the one hand, Nicholas begins to catch on that Fanny is a little less than virtuous, and, on the other, when the royals finally boot her out of the country, having implicated both her and Nicholas in an elaborate scheme to spirit away rare jewels and fund an anti-tsarist revolution therewith. Fanny fades away into history, having failed in her effort to cash in with a memoir published in France (“the imperial government, once alerted, managed to get the French Republic to confiscate the book and deport its author”). Nicholas was shipped off east of the Urals, where he distinguished himself as a geographer and explorer, still nursing his love for Fanny.
A modestly intriguing pastime for royalty buffs, though one requiring a certain willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-87113-922-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The perils of country living are brought to light in a confidently executed novel.
Family bonds are twisted and broken in Jordan’s meditation on the fallen South.
Debut novelist Jordan won the 2006 Bellwether Prize for this disquieting reflection on rural America, told from multiple perspectives. After steadfastly guarding her virginity for three decades, cosmopolitan Memphis schoolmarm Laura Chappell agrees to marry a rigid suitor named Henry McAllan, and in 1940 they have their first child. At the end of World War II, Henry drags his bride, their now expanded brood and his sadistic Pappy off to a vile, primitive farm in the backwaters of Mississippi that she names “Mudbound.” Promised an antebellum plantation, Laura finds that Henry has been fleeced and her family is soon living in a bleak, weather-beaten farmhouse lacking running water and electricity. Resigned to an uncomfortable truce, the McAllans stubbornly and meagerly carve out a living on the unforgiving Delta. Their unsteady marriage becomes more complicated with the arrival of Henry’s enigmatic brother Jamie, plagued by his father’s wrath, a drinking problem and the guilt of razing Europe as a bomber pilot. Adding his voice to the narrative is Ronsel Jackson, the son of one of the farm’s tenants, whose heroism as a tank soldier stands for naught against the racism of the hard-drinking, deeply bigoted community. Punctuated by an illicit affair, a gruesome hate crime and finally a quiet, just murder in the night, the book imparts misery upon the wicked—but the innocent suffer as well. “Sometimes it’s necessary to do wrong,” claims Jamie McAllan in the book’s equivocal dénouement. “Sometimes it’s the only way to make things right.”
The perils of country living are brought to light in a confidently executed novel.Pub Date: March 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-56512-569-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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