A historically astute love story that laboriously pulls at readers’ heartstrings.
In this debut romance, a couple trace their twin destinies back to former lives during the Civil War.
Amanda Parker was definitely not on the hunt for love—after losing both parents to an automobile accident and her brother to a boating catastrophe, she learned that her fiance suddenly died in a plane crash. But then she saves the life of a handsome police officer, Mark Callahan, and she’s not only magnetically drawn to him, but also inexplicably believes that she knows him somehow. The same peculiar feeling haunts Mark, who muses at one point: “This is Twilight Zone stuff. Can there be some sort of history between us? Were we lovers once?” Intrigued by their nebulous bond, they turn to Amanda’s godmother, Mary, for help—she’s an accomplished psychologist practiced in the art of past life therapy. With Mary’s guidance, Amanda is transported first back to her own childhood, and then to what appears to be a prior existence as a little girl named Bonnie in a South roiled by the Civil War. The tale chronicles Bonnie’s experiences growing up under the supervision of a slave, Magdalene, a woman she loves like a mother, and the way in which her perilous existence intersects with Mark’s prior incarnation. Samyann’s story is breathtakingly ambitious—she essentially constructs two seamlessly braided novels that dramatically depict metempsychosis, a love story, and the terrible wages of the Civil War. She suggestively intimates that a person’s emotional constitution is the sum result of the soul’s long historical pedigree, an accumulation of experiences that reaches back far in time. The novel flourishes most when the subject matter is the Civil War—the author artfully depicts its moral complications with scrupulous nuance, and the dangers those years posed to blacks and whites alike. But Samyann’s writing strains with too much transparent effort to elicit emotions, and as a result the romantic story devolves into overwrought melodrama. The prose itself can be overdone to the point of absurdity: Mark’s “gentle baritone seemed to evoke an ancient Celtic breeze.” What kind of breeze is both ancient and Celtic? But even more distracting is the author’s inclination to supply too much commentary, simultaneously telling the tale and explaining it to readers. She discloses her characters’ thoughts by representing their inner monologues in italicized speech, a heavy-handed approach that seems to assume readers’ persistent incomprehension. Early on, Amanda muses: “Hope he doesn’t take this invitation to dinner wrong, but he’s been so persistent. I’m not leading him on, am I? No. I’ve been nice, nothing more, polite. He can’t be misinterpreting this.” The chief strength of Samyann’s work is, besides its historical breadth, its unabashed romanticism—she cheerleads, without a hint of irony or cynicism, a kind of cosmic metaphysic of love that only the most jaded won’t find tenderly endearing. Unfortunately, that same romanticism easily inclines toward its corresponding vice, treacly sentimentality.
A historically astute love story that laboriously pulls at readers’ heartstrings.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-9884090-0-2
Page Count: 404
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
