A fairly romanticized view of history, yet an amiable first effort sure to appeal to the many fans of the genre.
A debut novel jumping between the saucy adventures of a 17th-century courtesan and the 21st-century academic researching her life.
Claire Donovan is almost finished with her dissertation on Alessandra Rossetti when she learns a Cambridge professor is about to challenge her entire thesis at an Italian conference. A bit of luck comes through when the economically strapped Claire gets a free trip to Venice—all she has to do is chaperone 14-year-old Gwen while the girl’s father honeymoons in France. Claire hopes to learn what the scholar has planned and then beat him to publishing. It sounds reasonable stateside, but that’s before Claire lands in magical Venice, where beautiful men and sparkling canals blur her focus. Not to mention escorting a girl with purple hair and an attitude, far different from the teenager Claire has spent the last two years of her life researching. Alessandra Rossetti is not yet 18 when her father and brother (and their fortune) are lost at sea. She briefly becomes the mistress of her financial advisor, but when he dies, Alessandra finds herself penniless. Without dowry or virginity, marriage prospects are slim, leaving the only other alternative—the convent. Or is it? The premier courtesan of Venice, La Celestia, accepts Alessandra as a protégé, and Alessandra takes to a life of prostitution. But soon political power plays involve her in ways that endanger her life. The fictional plot turns on a bit of history—the Spanish controlled most of Italy at the time, with the exception of Venice, which they had hoped to invade. In this telling, Venice can thank its sovereignty to Alessandra. Both Claire and Alessandra have more adventure than they bargained for (Claire is courted by a gorgeous architect, then nearly thrown in jail over a misunderstanding), but by the end, it will come as little surprise that things end well for our heroines. The dialogue is often exposition-heavy and the coincidences are a bit too much, but Phillips’s depiction of lonely Claire blossoming in Venice is nicely told.
A fairly romanticized view of history, yet an amiable first effort sure to appeal to the many fans of the genre.Pub Date: March 6, 2007
ISBN: 1-4165-2737-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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