Ably explores a bygone milieu while trafficking in high emotional drama.
A historical novel of royal intrigue and Machiavellian machinations, set during the halcyon days of the 18th-century French court, by retired accountant and author Gananathan.
The heroine of Gananathan's emotionally haunting debut is Kathryn Verne, the former lover of the Duke of Orleans. As the book opens, Kathryn has fled the tumult of the city and returned to the country estate where she was raised. She spends the next few hundred pages recalling her life in the royal court, which was experienced fully, wildly and deeply. Kathryn, Gananathan writes, was once a true ingénue, blessed with blue eyes that reflected "innocence coupled with youthful exuberance" and "pink lips" opened "as though about to break into a shy smile." But her innocence left her open to the advances of the relatively disagreeable Duke of Orleans. The Duke treated young Kathryn with apparent affection until she became pregnant, when he unceremoniously tossed her aside. (Par for the course, unfortunately, as far as 18th-century court life.) Eventually, he became the regent of France, which was another bout of bad news for Kathryn. Her son, Daniel, was kidnapped, and she was forced to go on the lam for the better part of a decade. So where did Daniel vanish to? Is he still alive? This is a hinge point in White of Flowers of Yesterday–even as Gananathan moves backwards in time, recounting the splendor of Kathryn's time among the royals, she ratchets up the suspense. Kathryn eventually finds a modicum of happiness, but not before the reader has been dragged through a long stretch of misery and heartache. Fortunately, the author has a pleasant style, and she dresses up what might have been a flat history lesson with a surfeit of grace and wit. For a reader interested in the social jousting of 18th century France, White Flowers of Yesterday will be a treat.
Ably explores a bygone milieu while trafficking in high emotional drama.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-4401-6620-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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