The author of Redcoat and the popular Sharpe series of historical military adventures drops into the 20th century for a yachting thriller about an unwilling earl and a missing van Gogh. The Earl of Stowey has decided that there's not much point in using one's hereditary title if one hasn't been left enough money to dress for the job. So he's just John Rossendale to his yachting bum cronies. Sailing the world on Sunflower, the sailboat he was able to buy with the little he was left, Rossendale has spent four years away from home and away from his odious mother and spiteful twin sister. But the bankers have called. Mum is on her deathbed and would he please have the decency to sail home and say good-bye? Nobleman that he is, Rossendale returns only to receive his mother's dying curse. The problem is that everybody seems to think John stole the family van Gogh, their last remaining art treasure, the sale of which would have kept the manor in the family. Worse yet, everybody thinks he still has the painting, and they're trying to get it back. A pair of goons sent by persons unknown are ready to demolish his yacht in the search for van Gogh's sunflowers. And the ravishing Jennifer Pallavicini, stepdaughter to England's nouveau richest collector, is ready to offer 20 million pounds on behalf of dad. But John hasn't the faintest idea where the painting is. He'd run away from the lot of them, but his evil twin is threatening to wrench their idiot sister away from her asylum in order to get control of her trust fund. And this Miss Pallavicini is awfully pretty. . . Competent but unexceptional sails-and-slaughter adventure. Mildly violent.
Pub Date: Aug. 14, 1989
ISBN: 0061000469
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1989
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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