by Terri Wolffe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 7, 2011
A lusty, lightweight romp.
An earl’s wife kidnaps and seduces a duke, only to fall in love with him.
In London 1796, a veiled woman approaches Lucien Brandford IV, the Duke of Carlsborough, and tells him that his former lover Lady Catherine has been injured. Concerned, the Duke boards a coach expecting to find the Lady, but once inside he is bound and drugged, then taken to an undisclosed location where he is shackled, blindfolded, to a four-poster bed. His captor, “Madame Dictator,” is lovely Lucinda Davenport, the young wife of elderly Lord Joshua Davenport, Earl of Compton, whose age and frailty have rendered him incapable of procreation. To ensure the family line, Lucinda has chosen vigorous and vital Lucien from a handful of candidates as the man to implant her with his seed—if only he will comply. Initially, the Duke refuses, demands his freedom and threatens to have his abductors captured and hanged. Although sexually naive, Lucinda is not easily put off. Under her spell, the duke becomes not merely compliant but a willing and inventive partner of remarkable stamina who delivers the goods again and again. Over the course of a few days at the Earl’s country estate, Lucien and Lucinda fall in love, and she finds fulfillment as a woman. Their romantic, sexual idyll is short-lived, however; Lucien has served his purpose. Both Lucien and Lucinda are appealing, if not particularly bright, characters, and certainly pleasant enough to accompany for a few rounds of bodice ripping. Their over-the-top sexploits are at times unintentionally humorous: “her body was exploding with yet another torrential organism.” The emotional connection between the lovers is believable, but the plot is simplistic, if not implausible. Surely, there are strapping country lads aplenty who could do the deed for a pittance. Why kidnap a duke and risk the gallows? But let us not quibble. In turbulent times, a bit of light-hearted fare is the coin of the realm.
A lusty, lightweight romp.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2011
ISBN: B004MME1HA
Page Count: 215
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2011
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 J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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