With torture and swordplay, there’s more (lowercase) gore than Washington generally offers and more fun than most readers...
A writer known for his satires of Washington, D.C., takes aim at religion in 16th-century Europe, where a relics trader is forced to steal one of Catholicism’s most coveted objects.
Buckley (But Enough About You, 2014, etc.) roams far from his usual inside-the-Beltway turf while tilting at earlier establishment types in this comic historical novel, his 16th book. In the year 1517, Dismas is the Relic Master at the high end of the holy-bone trade for two competing collectors, Frederick of Saxony and Albrecht of Mainz. When Dismas learns that his nest egg has been smashed by a Bernie Madoff precursor, he agrees to a scheme that depends on Albrecht’s envy of Frederick’s larger collection. But Dismas and his partner in crime, the German painter Dürer, are caught trying to pull the linen over Albrecht’s eyes with a fake shroud—Christ’s burial cloth—and the result is a penance compelling Dismas to steal the “real” shroud, “the most closely guarded relic in Christendom.” What ensues might be pitched Hollywood-style as The Princess Bride meets Ocean’s XIII. Dismas, Dürer, and three German mercenaries navigate a string of mishaps and brothels and rescue a beautiful damsel only to find themselves competing with another shroud thief. Buckley finds easy targets with the rampant abuses in relics, which make money off the laity’s guilt and gullibility. Dismas has heard of a dozen foreskins from the infant Jesus and enough arrows from the perforation of St. Sebastian “to supply the entire Roman army.” The writer also works in the contemporaneous rise of Martin Luther and the campaign he was able to wage against such abuses under the curious protection of Frederick, the great relic collector.
With torture and swordplay, there’s more (lowercase) gore than Washington generally offers and more fun than most readers might expect even from twisted history.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2575-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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