Happy families, alike or not, do not electrifying fiction make.
Southern girls gone mild figure in Brown’s nostalgic paean to a town bifurcated by the Mason-Dixon Line.
A prefatory author’s note issues a disclaimer: “This is not a plot-driven book.” But what readers, particularly of Brown’s various mystery series, may not be expecting is that the book is also not driven by suspense or conflict. Instead, it portrays more or less happy people leading uneventful and in some cases exceedingly prosperous lives in 1920. Celeste, the protagonist, is a wealthy heiress, gorgeous, bisexual, and vaguely uncomfortable with her enforced leisure since her father left the stewardship of the family industries to her brothers. With her only partially mixed blessing, her brother Curtis has just married her longtime lover, Ramelle, who is pregnant with his child. The story, such as it is, revolves around a half-year in the lives of Celeste, her friends, and retainers in the town of Runnymede, situated on the Pennsylvania/Maryland border. Celeste falls in love with Ben, a baseball player who's a World War I veteran and an aspiring stained-glass artist. She sets about making his life better without overtly appearing to be his benefactor and wounding his male pride. Her housekeeper and cook, Cora, has two daughters, Louise and Julia, who provide the closest thing to entertainment this novel offers with their crushes and teenage rivalries, including a long-standing spat with a classmate, Dimps Jr., whose main offense seems to be large breasts. Celeste comes to the aid of her older sister, Carlotta, who runs a Catholic school, when a fire breaks out, threatening to expose a major source of the school’s and Carlotta’s income: a cellarful of bootleg liquor. (Prohibition has just descended on Runnymede’s recalcitrant citizens.) Apparently both a prequel to and recap of her other Runnymede novels (e.g. Loose Lips, 1999, Six of One, 1978, etc.), this outing serves up unremitting dollops of niceness.
Happy families, alike or not, do not electrifying fiction make.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2016
ISBN: 9780553392654
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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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