A sometimes-engrossing, sometimes-overwrought journey to the soul’s dark side.
The notorious Romantic poet spiritually presides over a modern-day fable of forbidden desire, apocalyptic foreboding, and campus melodrama.
Eads’ novel hopscotches between settings and centuries as it elaborates its transhistorical saga of psychosexual hysteria. It picks up with Byron’s storied 1816 Lake Geneva sojourn with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and Shelley’s future wife, Mary, full of melancholy musings and ghost stories. Out swimming one day, Byron starts to flounder and, before you can say, “For the love of God, I cannot stand to see this!...End my life but show me no more!” he sees the world engulfed in a burning hellscape—prophetic visions he will immortalize in his poem “Darkness.” Fast-forward to present-day Westervelt University and an array of entanglements: professor Adam Fane, a man staggering under several guilty secrets; his son Gordon, a student and basketball star; English professor Amber Oxley, who is carrying on a hidden affair with Gordon; and Gordon’s bluff but troubled roommate John-Mark. The entwined storylines fester with emotional turmoil: Byron has to be restrained by Count Guiccioli’s men from hurling his young daughter from a window; Adam’s mind wanders compulsively to his boyhood homoerotic friendship with a handsome all-American schoolmate. As years pass, unacknowledged perversions propagate between generations. Linking them are contrived resonances—Adam has a clubfoot like Byron; Gordon has a dog he calls Shiloh, Byron’s nickname for Shelley; a latter-day tween actually reads Byron—and, above all, the main characters’ constant, mentally crippling subjection to Byronic visions of ravaged faces and fire. This last motif means the novel frequently bogs down in turgid dream imagery that’s often more tiresome than evocative. Eads is a skillful writer, though, and when he sticks to describing the real world his characters inhabit—the sphere of aristocratic aesthetes and, even better, the brash but awkward jock-ish culture of Gordon and his buds—rather than the netherworlds of their imagining, he crafts complex, convincing portraits of people struggling with sins they can’t quite perceive.
A sometimes-engrossing, sometimes-overwrought journey to the soul’s dark side.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59021-553-1
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Lethe Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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