Passion trumps reason in this gothic extravaganza.
Scientific speculation seeps into the world of the eerie in Trussoni's (The Fortress, 2016, etc.) lush thriller.
Alberta Monte, known to all as Bert, is mourning a miscarriage and has recently separated from her husband when she receives a letter at her Hudson Valley home informing her that she has been identified as the last living descendant of the House of Montebianco. Despite a “creeping sense of danger slithering up my spine,” Bert allows the estate's lawyer to sweep her off by private jet first to a luxury hotel in Turin and then by helicopter to Montebianco Castle in the remote, snowbound Italian Alps. Finding herself without cellphone or internet access, and observing that the helicopter pilot doesn't return for her at the promised time, Bert begins to suspect that her inheritance has its minuses as well as its pluses. Life inside the castle, which comes complete with eccentric caretakers, vicious guard dogs, and a madwoman in the attic, is hard enough. Outside the castle live blue-eyed, white-haired, big-footed monsters with whom, she comes to understand, she shares a surprising kinship. As she discovers her links with those inside the castle and outside it, her sense of danger grows. Trussoni plays here with the contemporary obsession with using DNA to uncover the past and employs some far-fetched scientific theories to explain the nature and existence of the humanoids that Bert gradually realizes are somehow connected to the complicated bloodline of the mysterious Montebiancos. Few, however, are likely to read the novel for its insights into genetics and biology. At its heart, this is an opulently romantic horror tale, with a plucky, if not always sensible, heroine who discovers she is part of a family whose dark secrets have been sheltered from the world at large.
Passion trumps reason in this gothic extravaganza.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-291275-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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
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"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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