A historical novel with an exotic locale, well-wrought historical details, tidbits about flora and fauna, and wonderful...
Lester’s (Marvels, 2018, etc.) first novel, set in Jamaica in the 18th century, reveals that paradise can be a mixed bag.
In 1762, plucky Martha Grant is offered a proposal of marriage by her cousin, Henry Mason, a Jamaican planter. She’s finding herself adrift after the death of her own true love, and fearing spinsterhood, she accepts Henry’s offer. Now she’s ready to fall in love with her new home of Jamaica, and the rest of the book mostly consists of her letters home to England and entries from her diary. Compared to his wastrel brother Jonas, Henry initially seems to be a good man, but readers quickly learn that he’s a tyrannical, arrogant, self-centered monster. Nonetheless, Martha is determined to make the best of it. Then Henry impregnates his half sister Pearl, whose mother is an African slave. In an elaborate ruse, it’s made to seem that the offspring, Peter, is actually Martha’s child. Things become particularly insufferable for Martha when Jonas dies and his widow, the outlandishly crude Antoinetta, comes to live with the Masons. This is Lester’s first novel, but she’s a much-published writer of biographies and histories, and it shows. Martha is a wonderfully well-rounded character—a romantic and an idealist but not at all naïve; she ekes out small victories with the brutish Henry and always leaves her surroundings just a tad better than how she found them. Lester also effectively shows how the Jamaican settlers have the trappings of civilization—such as a Governor’s Ball and expensive finery—but at bottom, they’re revealed to be ruthless materialists and exploiters. The childish and grasping Antoinetta—representing the worst of the colonial infestation—strikingly contrasts with the beautiful, childlike Pearl, a happy and generous local. Interspersed are snarky poems, presumably from Martha’s witty imagination, which skewer the society’s pretensions and its matrons’ cattiness in a kind of off-key Greek chorus.
A historical novel with an exotic locale, well-wrought historical details, tidbits about flora and fauna, and wonderful characters.Pub Date: April 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-7335984-0-8
Page Count: 271
Publisher: Mason & Fraser
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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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