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SCARPIA

Overly ornate though engrossing depiction of a tumultuous period in Italian history, when the French looted Italian...

The back story of Puccini’s opera Tosca.

Early on we meet Floria Tosca, a 15-year-old peasant girl from the Venetian countryside. She's gifted with a beautiful voice, which is noticed in 1789 by a bishop who hears her singing in her local parish choir. He invites her to Venice—promising her parents she will be safely housed in a convent when she’s not soloing in the cathedral. But soon a nobleman, Prince Belgioioso d’Este, persuades her that only an operatic career would fully exploit her gifts. Scarpia, the villain in Tosca, is the much more likable main character here. A member of the lesser nobility, this young Sicilian is drummed out of the Spanish army for insubordinate acts of derring-do. He makes his way to Rome, where he's offered a respectable if less-than-adventurous post with the papal guards. As revolution overtakes France, he's sent to Venice to assess that city’s readiness for French anti-royalist aggression. There, he has a brief romantic encounter with Tosca. Back in Rome, Scarpia enjoys the patronage of the pope’s treasurer, Ruffo, who educates him in the internecine intrigues and pitfalls of Roman society and ultimately negotiates a marriage for him to a princess, Paola. Scarpia and Paola both welcome the match, and to place them on an equal footing, the pope elevates him to the rank of baron. Napoleon’s star rises and his forces conquer Rome, exacting a high price in fines and works of art from both the papacy and the nobility. Paola falls prey to the blandishments of a sinister French portrait painter, while Scarpia is exiled, triggering the events detailed in the opera. A character list is sorely needed, and often, story and conflict struggle to stay afloat in a deluge of exposition.

Overly ornate though engrossing depiction of a tumultuous period in Italian history, when the French looted Italian treasures for the Louvre and deposed the pope.

Pub Date: March 1, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-63286-324-9

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016

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ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE

Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.

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Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.

In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.

Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.

Pub Date: May 6, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014

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THE NICKEL BOYS

Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...

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The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.

Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.

Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.

Pub Date: July 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019

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