by Suzanne Hadfield Semsch ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 25, 2009
A gripping, richly textured portrait of colonial life in crisis.
Romance, slavery and the American Revolution roil this engrossing historical novel, based on the life of a minor Founding Father.
Francis Lightfoot Lee, scion of one of Virginia’s finest families, is a confirmed bachelor at the age of 32, but then he gets a load of ravishing Becky Tayloe. There are obstacles to their relationship–she’s only 16, he’s got a live-in mistress–but love conquers all, and soon they are happily married and immersed in running their vast plantation. Francis the gentleman farmer has crops to put in, overseers to hire and slaves to tend. Becky has a mansion to run while she frets ever more distractedly about her failure to get pregnant. Along with his charismatic brother Richard and other firebrands like Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, Francis gets caught up in the escalating quarrel with Great Britain. He and Becky go to Philadelphia, where Francis flounders about in the poisonous factional intrigues of the Continental Congress. As triumphs and trials follow, the couple maintains a loving union and a reasonably randy sex life. Semsch has done an enormous amount of research on Lee, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and it shows in her fine-grained study of Virginia’s planter aristocracy at a crossroads in history. Theirs is a world of elegance and refinement whose rituals of courtesy don’t quite hide the hierarchy and coercion that underlie them, especially in the fraught relationship between masters and slaves. Francis and Becky pride themselves on their kindness, but their behavior is rife with small, unthinking cruelties to the servants they profess to love. The slaves, meanwhile, walk a tightrope, suppressing their aspirations and carefully nurturing their bonds with the whites who control their fate, but always conscious of the trauma and violence their masters can mete out on a whim. The clashing currents of freedom and imprisonment that course through the saga make for a compelling read.
A gripping, richly textured portrait of colonial life in crisis.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-4596-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
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. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960
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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