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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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