A careful, intelligent account of the personal motives behind historical events. Dramatic and instructive.
A Revolutionary War historical from Cooney (Small Town Girl, not reviewed) portrays the rebellion unleashed by British atrocities in a small village in Maine.
William and Lavinia Mowlam were born and raised in New England, but they grew up thinking of Great Britain, though they’d never seen it, as home. Even after William was abducted by redcoats during the French and Indian War and forced into service as a guide for more than a year, he came home exhausted but not especially radicalized. Lavinia, however, never forgave the British for what they did to him and, now, grows to hate the mother country. With the encouragement of her brother-in-law John Avens, a Boston clergyman who moves in the same circles as Paul Revere and Samuel Adams, the highly educated Lavinia begins to write anonymous articles attacking the Crown. Sedition is always dangerous, but who would suspect a farmwife in the wilds of Maine? Who, that is, except Loyalist merchant Samuel Leyson, who’d been shown the door when he tried to court Lavinia years before. Acting on a tip from Leyson, a party of English soldiers disguised as Indians attack and murder William and Lavinia and their five children at night in October 1774. The British will come to regret the atrocity, which turns an entire region against them. Lavinia’s brother, the ship captain Patrick Rousse, bends his energies to privateering and begins raiding British frigates and ports. John Avens gives up preaching and throws himself into the revolutionary cause. Most ambitious of all is the widow Winnie Goodridge, a local innkeeper who sets up a foundry on the old Mowlam farm and begins to produce guns and shot for the Continental Army. With the help of Patrick’s services as a smuggler and gunrunner, the Mowlam foundry becomes a decisive factor in the colonial uprising.
A careful, intelligent account of the personal motives behind historical events. Dramatic and instructive.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2004
ISBN: 1-58465-356-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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