An engaging and atypical Reconstruction-era saga.
Sharp’s historical novel follows a 19th-century Missourian as he spends decades searching for the meaning of life, finding and losing love along the way.
Teenager William Ebhart yearns for action. Too young to take part in the Civil War, he watched it unfold from the sidelines; his father died fighting in the Confederate army. William, feeling shackled by his family’s tragedies, decides to leave home, and he falls in love with a gorgeous-but-jaded prostitute, joins a traveling medicine show, inadvertently helps a notorious group of outlaws rob a bank, loses the girl to a wealthier man, and returns home—all in the first 75 pages of Sharp’s (Jacob’s Cellar, 2012, etc.) epic novel. The rest of the book maintains the swift pace, as William goes on to marry a (seemingly) nice girl, become a father, and learn Shakespeare. After his wife abandons him, he masters a respectable trade as a lamplighter and reunites with the prostitute. Later, he takes back his wife and almost dies of yellow fever. The story is never dull, but readers may find that Sharp is too generous with plot teasers, revealing points that might have been more enjoyable if withheld. He provides plenty of forthright details about each character’s inner workings, and as William grapples with his past and toys with his future, he analyzes the meanings of faith, truth and morality. Such philosophical meanderings, along with references to Shakespeare’s play The Winter’s Tale, elevate this story, although the frequent typos detract. Sharp also sprinkles in real-life characters and events without it ever seeming contrived; for example, famous outlaws Jesse and Frank James pop in and out of the narrative, and William spends the latter part of the book working in Panama during France’s ill-fated canal construction in the 1880s.
An engaging and atypical Reconstruction-era saga.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-1480036406
Page Count: 268
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
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