A poignant melodrama with a heroine that readers will root for.
In Burges’ debut novel, a professional violinist searches for meaning in life after a tragic incident leaves her unable to play.
London-based Isabelle Bryant has a well-celebrated and critically acclaimed career as a violinist. She’s known for both her talent and beauty; some critics call her “Beethoven’s Babe.” But although her public life is glamorous, she’s privately unhappy: Her alcoholic husband, Howard, a conductor, emotionally and physically abuses her and calls her a “celebrity whore.” One night, he viciously attacks her, resulting in her losing two fingers of her left hand in a car door. Unable to play her violin professionally, Isabelle struggles with depression and disillusionment. She travels with her friend Hortense Lafayette, a singer, and begins a new romance with Daniel Carter, a publishing executive, and she starts to feel better about her life. She finds a new passion in writing and public speaking, ultimately discovering she can still spread the joy of classical music without playing her violin. Although Howard looms in the background of her journey, she relies on her friends and newfound inner strength to overcome her past tragedies. Burges offers a moving ode to classical music in this tale. Her love for and expertise regarding the genre comes across in her many glowing descriptions of Isabelle’s skills and of the music she plays: “Shimmering strings then picked up the mantle again and it felt like they were being surrounded by legend and mythology.” Isabelle’s emotional transformation is captivating, from the harrowing moment she loses her fingers to her final acceptance that she can no longer play. Although the road-to-redemption plot isn’t exactly groundbreaking, Burges doesn’t lean on predictable clichés. Instead, the story unfolds at a smooth, entrancing pace with enough twists to keep one engaged.
A poignant melodrama with a heroine that readers will root for.Pub Date: May 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9930777-1-5
Page Count: 458
Publisher: Satin Paperbacks
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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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