Here is a novel “ripped from the headlines”…provided you found the headlines in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. Yes, we’re talking about the infamous salem witch trials. With a cameo role by Ray Bradbury’s ancestor, accused witch Mary Bradbury.
Veteran journalist Kolb anchors this historical fiction to the fate of Mary Bradbury, the only convicted witch to escape with her life (from a fetid Boston prison). The two main characters in this story are the Rev. Cotton Mather and the invented character, Hopestill Foster, brought to the new world as an indentured servant. Much of the book is in flashbacks, as in the first half of the book a fanatical Mather interrogates Hopestill, delirious in the grip of the “Small pocks.” The belief in witches is mind-boggling to the modern secular mind, but it was all too tragically real then and there. The Puritans have to answer not just for the witch hunt (a useful term they bequeathed to us!), but for their brutal treatment of all dissenters, especially the Quakers. Other real people populate these pages, such as the outspoken and charismatic Anne Hutchinson (hounded out of the colony), the magisterial families of the Cottons and the Mathers, and the heroic Maj. Robert Pike and Mary’s husband, Thomas. And of course there are the Indian tribes with their shifting alliances and loyalties. This is very much the story of the hapless Hopestill, who is adrift between Indian and White society but who never loses his essential decency. Along the way there are “monstrous” births (Devil’s spawn), switched infants, purloined letters—all in a miasma of toxic righteousness. We have always felt ambivalent about our Puritan forebears, forebears who founded Harvard College while the wilderness still threatened them, and at the same time believed in witches and that God sanctioned their killing. Kolb tells the story well. The flashbacks are a particularly good narrative device, and the prose matches the unrelenting drama. Helpful cast of characters, afterword, etc. provided.
Long after the book is closed, the reader will be pondering that time and place and how it still reverberates in the American psyche.
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-942146-22-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Garn Press
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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