A little high-minded but, in the main, thoroughly enjoyable hokum.
Historical romance debut with a superabundance of plot twists and psychological turns,
In the Regency England of 1819, six-year-old Colin Fraser is stolen from his home and made the bargaining chip of a Spanish zealot named Carevelo, who believes that Colin’s father Charles, a rising young politician of means, possesses the Carevelo family ring that Carevelo needs to fight the Spanish monarchy. While the police search for Colin, Charles and his beautiful wife Mélanie look for the ring. Seven years earlier, during the French occupation of Spain, Charles had led a British expedition into the Spanish mountains to secure the piece of jewelry, but it was lost after an ambush by the French. While in the mountains, Charles met Mélanie, a young half-Spanish/half-French anti-Bonapartist noblewoman running from French soldiers who had raped her and murdered her family. Charles married Mélanie and has raised and loved Colin, the child she was carrying, as his own. But the kidnapping forces Mélanie to admit to Charles the lies that their marriage was based on: She was actually a spy, not a noblewoman, and Colin’s father was not a rapist but her spy master, Raoul O’Roarke. Coincidentally (or not), O’Roarke knew Charles years earlier and had once given him a copy of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. Charles, whose liberal ideals and feminist sympathies are remarkable, to say the least, reacts to his wife’s confessions with understandable fury at first, then begins considering his own deceptions. The combination of literary allusions and psychological self-examination gets pretty thick at times. As the two close in on the ring’s mystery, Mélanie is stabbed and Charles shot: clearly, someone wants to stop their search. But Charles and Mélanie are determined to save their son, and their marriage.
A little high-minded but, in the main, thoroughly enjoyable hokum.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-621133-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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