Schiller (Spy Island, 2013, etc.) fictionalizes the voyage of an ill-fated and little-known French party to Tibet during the 1890s.
Insatiable French explorer Gabriel Bonvalot burns to mount an expedition to Tibet to enter the mysterious city of Lhasa, where no Westerner has ever been. Even the intrepid Russian-Polish trekker Nikolai Prejevalsky fails to reach the fabled city that Tibet has declared off-limits to Europeans, and his travels even eventually cost him his life. One problem plagues Bonvalot in carrying out his improbable plan: he lacks the financial wherewithal to organize such an ambitious venture. To the rescue comes the Duke of Chartres, whose noisome and mischievous wastrel son, Prince Henri, has made a distraction of himself through his wanton ways. Bonvalot promises the Duke to take Henri along for the ride in exchange for the Duke’s fiscal backing. Despite Bonvalot’s protests, the winsome Camille Dancourt wants to find her long-vanished husband, lost somewhere in Tibet. The self-assured Dancourt joins this unlikely crew as it plods ever farther and higher into the thin Tibetan air that makes the hapless band increasingly sick. In addition to battling nature, Bonvalot finds himself tormented by Prejevalsky’s ghost, which appears at inauspicious moments. He doesn’t know whether the ghastly specter is caused by his own mental instability or if the phantom actually exists. Brooklyn author Schiller, an apt storyteller, spins out the many exploits, the gnawing hunger, and the searing cold that befall the adventurers and their companions, including the colorful Belgian missionary Father Dedeken, as they wander deep into the far reaches of the Tibetan hinterlands. In one episode, the group gets caught in an avalanche that is a “dash close for comfort,” says the French prince, sounding for all the world like a posh English chap. This cultural sleight of hand works, though, and Schiller evokes the Victorian era and its explorer ethos through a tale that in style and design should prove compelling to the historical fiction fan.
An intriguing, sometimes-florid, but fast-paced, novelistic account of a European expedition into the wilds of Tibet by an accomplished thriller and historical adventure writer.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-25409-7
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Tradewinds Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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The years pass by at a fast and steamy clip in Blume’s latest adult novel (Wifey, not reviewed; Smart Women, 1984) as two friends find loyalties and affections tested as they grow into young women. In sixth grade, when Victoria Weaver is asked by new girl Caitlin Somers to spend the summer with her on Martha’s Vineyard, her life changes forever. Victoria, or more commonly Vix, lives in a small house; her brother has muscular dystrophy; her mother is unhappy, and money is scarce. Caitlin, on the other hand, lives part of the year with her wealthy mother Phoebe, who’s just moved to Albuquerque, and summers with her father Lamb, equally affluent, on the Vineyard. The story of how this casual invitation turns the two girls into what they call "Summer sisters" is prefaced with a prologue in which Vix is asked by Caitlin to be her matron of honor. The years in between are related in brief segments by numerous characters, but mostly by Vix. Caitlin, determined never to be ordinary, is always testing the limits, and in adolescence falls hard for Von, an older construction worker, while Vix falls for his friend Bru. Blume knows the way kids and teens speak, but her two female leads are less credible as they reach adulthood. After high school, Caitlin travels the world and can’t understand why Vix, by now at Harvard on a scholarship and determined to have a better life than her mother has had, won’t drop out and join her. Though the wedding briefly revives Vix’s old feelings for Bru, whom Caitlin is marrying, Vix is soon in love with Gus, another old summer friend, and a more compatible match. But Caitlin, whose own demons have been hinted at, will not be so lucky. The dark and light sides of friendship breathlessly explored in a novel best saved for summer beachside reading.
Pub Date: May 8, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-32405-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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