More old-fashioned historical romance from Laker (The Golden Tulip, etc. etc.), this time set in Venice just before Napoleon forces the declining republic to its knees. Laker's latest tale of high jinks, love, and woe stars an orphan girl named Marietta, raised in Venice's Ospedale della PietÖ, an asylum for abandoned girlchildren famous for its choir. Marietta's best friend at the Ospedale is Elena, who sings almost as beautifully as Marietta does—but the carefully guarded foundlings grow as nervous as fillies as they come of age and begin to be exposed to the color, excitement, and licentiousness of the city at concerts where they perform. Marietta falls in love with Alix Desgrange, though the relationship is nipped in the bud by a widow who wants the young Frenchman for herself. Meanwhile, Elena is engaged to the scion of the Celano family (Venetian top dogs) but is forced to marry his cold younger brother, Filippo, when fiancÇ number one suddenly dies. That makes things tough for the bosom friends, since Marietta's eventually chosen by Domenico Torrisi. The Torrisi and Celano clans have been wrangling with each other for centuries, and, of course, the ladies get caught in the vendetta—with Elena attempting to prove that her husband masterminded a plot against Signor Torrisi and Marietta rescuing her friend from Signor Celano, who's been trying to do her in. Laker's usual sanitized kind of history, with a fairy tale for postpubescent girls imposed on top. But her characters are spunky and her plot satisfies, even if it doesn't describe the character behind La Serenissima's mask in anything other than the most simplistic terms.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-385-42190-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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