A historical adventure that ends with a stunning revelation.
Harrison’s (Our Man in the Dark, 2011) new historical fiction explores family and freedom, rage and revenge in the melting pot of post–Civil War San Francisco.
Jupiter Smith left Col. Smith’s plantation to fight for the Union. The colonel raged, but he didn’t stop Jupiter. Jupiter was his slave, yes, but he was also his son, a connection Harrison slowly and elegantly reveals. What follows touches on themes from The Odyssey, Jack London’s Sea Wolf and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. At war’s end, Jupiter returns to the plantation seeking his wife, Sonya, and child. Instead, he finds the colonel descended into syphilitic madness and Sonya gone west. Thinking it an act of mercy, Jupiter kills the colonel and sets out for San Francisco. There he takes work "crimping"—shanghaiing men and selling them to ship captains. Jupiter can't find Sonya right away, but Archer Smith, the colonel’s son, finds him, seeking vengeance. However, war-wounded Archer’s addicted to opium, easily acquired along the embarcadero. Harrison’s clever with descriptions, capable of sketching a character with a quick sentence—"Large ears and head, beady eyes and too many teeth, he looked like the product of royal incest"—and his deftly plotted historical novel quickly becomes an around-the-world adventure. Sonya and young son Jacob are told Jupiter has traveled to Liberia, so they set out for Africa. Jupiter and Archer are themselves crimped and sold to Capt. Barrett, a China-bound gun-runner able to "slip through any blockade like a shadow." Jupiter, Archer and Barrett are soon marooned on Tikopia Island, prisoners of the Kurtz-like Yerby, one of a plethora of characters in San Francisco, China, Cuba and finally Liberia who color the narrative, a motley cast ever conniving to betray, cheat or kill one another.
A historical adventure that ends with a stunning revelation.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2578-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
None of the characters shine enough to inspire or enlighten readers.
A tale of several generations of women cursed to love men who love other women.
As the book opens, Gabriela Siton relates the story of her mother Luna’s death, and in describing her final year, Yishai-Levi, a journalist and nonfiction author, captures the family dynamic and lays out the drama—Luna doesn’t get along with Gabriela; she’s unhappy with her husband, David; she didn’t get along with her mother, Rosa; and all this has left Gabriela at loose ends. Gabriela seeks answers from her Aunt Allegra in Tel Aviv, trying to understand the family “curse,” and then the book shifts mostly to Rosa’s and Luna’s viewpoints. It abruptly shifts back in the end to Gabriela’s, skipping over years, when earlier, the narrative plodded slowly through days. There are so many characters that we only get a brief look at some of them, and so many disappointments and heartbreaks that they begin to lose their impact. Ordinary lives can be made beautiful, but when they belong to characters who are either unsympathetic or rudimentary, they are rendered ineffective. The characters’ faith, which influences so many of the important decisions in their lives, mostly comes across as routine, habit, or even superstition. Some of the characters become involved in the struggle for modern Israel, and their political fervor is similarly underdeveloped.
None of the characters shine enough to inspire or enlighten readers.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07816-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Detectives, doctors, and dastardly scoundrels abound in this fascinating historical novel.
Luring women with the false promise of a safe, albeit illegal, abortion, a serial killer is on the loose in 1880s New York City.
In this sequel to The Gilded Hour (2015), Donati returns to a time when female doctors were viewed with surprise if not outright hostility. Cousins Anna and Sophie Savard have earned their professional medical training, both turning to practice primarily on women. Grieving the recent death of her attorney husband, Cap, from tuberculosis, Sophie plans to use her inheritance to establish scholarships and a welcoming home for women pursuing medical studies. Happily married to Jack Mezzanotte, a detective investigating the killings with his partner, Oscar Maroney, Anna is a highly accomplished surgeon, but they have just lost custody of the children they were fostering, children the church wants raised by Catholics. The sprawling Savard family blends multiple ethnicities, including Italian, Mohawk, and African American, and Donati crafts strong female characters who draw upon the wisdom of their ancestors to transcend the slings and arrows of petty racism and sexism. She juxtaposes these women, thriving on the energies of the zeitgeist advancing women’s rights, with the villains, who sink into the muck of dubious morality crusades, such as the anti-contraception and anti-abortion campaigns of Anthony Comstock and the xenophobic orphanage system run by the Roman Catholic Church. Through Sophie’s and Anna’s work, Donati sketches in the historical backdrop of reproductive challenges in late-19th-century America: Women dying in childbirth, women dying to avoid childbirth, women and babies mangled by medical quacks, and children drugged to the point of death just to keep peace in the nursery. The wounds inflicted by the serial killer caused prolonged, severely painful deaths, suggesting not inept but malicious intent. And as the Drs. Savard assist Jack and Oscar in their investigation, another woman goes missing.
Detectives, doctors, and dastardly scoundrels abound in this fascinating historical novel.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-425-27182-7
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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