A charming, if slight, historical tale of a girl and her horse.
A Swedish princess in 16th-century Estonia forms a special bond with a horse in this middle-grade debut.
It’s 1561, and 11-year-old Ardith is homesick. Her father, Erik, has been crowned king of Estonia (which was recently conquered by Sweden), so they and her mother, Linnea, move to dilapidated Castle Toompea in the capital city of Tallinn. Ardith misses many things about her old home in Stockholm, especially Magi, the horse she left behind. The lonely girl takes refuge in the castle stables, where she strikes up an uncertain friendship with Peeter, the stable master’s son. Ardith is enchanted when a colt with a silver mane is born. She becomes determined to become best friends with the foal, whom she names Victor. It takes a lot of effort—and carrots—but by the time Ardith is 14, she and Victor are inseparable. One day, she’s shocked to find Victor being fitted with a harness; she believes that the horse far too special to pull a carriage, even for the king. Determined to prove that Victor is meant for greater things, she resolves to enter the horse into the Royal Estonian Horse Races. But no woman—not even a princess—has ever jockeyed in that competition, and neither her father nor the Tallinn town council like breaking tradition. Lykens’ first novel has an unusual setting and a plucky heroine, and although Ardith’s feminist notions seem a bit modern for the era, it makes for a much more satisfying story. After all, girls having to fight for gender equality remains an unfortunately timely subject. Youngsters who love horses will enjoy Ardith’s struggle to befriend and train Victor. Readers who aren’t already horse-crazy, though, may find that there’s not much else to hold their interest; a few passages contrast Ardith’s idyllic royal childhood with those of children like Peeter, who now live under foreign control, but the subject is quickly abandoned.
A charming, if slight, historical tale of a girl and her horse.Pub Date: Dec. 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-979509-65-7
Page Count: 164
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2018
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
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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