Moderately engaging, here and there. But there’s no real passion in it, and the end result is tepid.
“Is true love possible between men and women?” asks the protagonist of this earnest second full-length fiction from the British screenwriter (Shadowlands, Gladiator) and novelist (The Society of Others, 2005).
The questioner is John “Bron” Dearborn, a writer of sorts who’s dismissed by his London flatmate (and former lover) Anna, just as he’s been commissioned to compose a book about the phenomenon of love at first sight. While staying with a friend in Devon, Bron experiences an epiphanic rapture upon sighting distractingly beautiful Flora Freeman (his fellow house guest)—a moment Bron instantly likens to the similar experience undergone by his book’s central subject: the fictional French Post-Impressionist Paul Marotte. Helplessly smitten, Bron courts the mercurial Flora (the itinerant wife of a rich older husband, who’s either endlessly indulgent or utterly indifferent to her). But she keeps sending mixed signals, first responding to Bron’s ardor, then quickly retreating from him. Help is offered by E.F. “Freddy” Christiansen, an independently wealthy Marotte scholar-collector—and Flora’s old friend—who also aids Bron’s researches, and arranges a rendezvous at his home in Switzerland, where Bron learns bitter lessons about the elusiveness of love and the difficulty of authenticating what our deepest instincts tell us must be real. The novel begins sluggishly, and marches somewhat stolidly in place, until Freddy’s Machiavellian posturing adds some much-needed malicious humor. Nicholson deftly layers in allusions to famous lovers (e.g., Bacall and Bogart, Victorian adventurer Richard Burton and his Isabell) who fit Bron’s thesis, and builds a beguiling house of cards surrounding the indistinct figures of Marotte and his beloved subject, English governess Kate Summer. But it’s all a setup, and neither the novel’s unsurprising payoff nor its annoyingly phony happy ending justify the redundant oversimplifications that lead up to them.
Moderately engaging, here and there. But there’s no real passion in it, and the end result is tepid.Pub Date: March 21, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-51625-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a...
Morrison's truly majestic fifth novel—strong and intricate in craft; devastating in impact.
Set in post-Civil War Ohio, this is the story of how former slaves, psychically crippled by years of outrage to their bodies and their humanity, attempt to "beat back the past," while the ghosts and wounds of that past ravage the present. The Ohio house where Sethe and her second daughter, 10-year-old Denver, live in 1873 is "spiteful. Full of a [dead] baby's venom." Sethe's mother-in-law, a good woman who preached freedom to slave minds, has died grieving. It was she who nursed Sethe, the runaway—near death with a newborn—and gave her a brief spell of contentment when Sethe was reunited with her two boys and first baby daughter. But the boys have by now run off, scared, and the murdered first daughter "has palsied the house" with rage. Then to the possessed house comes Paul D., one of the "Pauls" who, along with Sethe, had been a slave on the "Sweet Home" plantation under two owners—one "enlightened," one vicious. (But was there much difference between them?) Sethe will honor Paul D.'s humiliated manhood; Paul D. will banish Sethe's ghost, and hear her stories from the past. But the one story she does not tell him will later drive him away—as it drove away her boys, and as it drove away the neighbors. Before he leaves, Paul D. will be baffled and anxious about Sethe's devotion to the strange, scattered and beautiful lost girl, "Beloved." Then, isolated and alone together for years, the three women will cling to one another as mother, daughter, and sister—found at last and redeemed. Finally, the ex-slave community, rebuilding on ashes, will intervene, and Beloved's tortured vision of a mother's love—refracted through a short nightmare life—will end with her death.
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a victim's dark violence, with a lyrical insistence and a clear sense of the time when a beleaguered peoples' "only grace...was the grace they could imagine."Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1987
ISBN: 9781400033416
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
