Morrow’s latest (he’s perhaps best known for The Godhead Trilogy) is commendably ambitious, but this intensely cerebral...
Dominating this wide-ranging historical adventure novel is the campaign by one woman to end witch hunts in England and its North American colonies.
Clever little Jennet Stearne. While her father Walter, self-appointed Witchfinder-General, is away on the warpath in eastern England in 1688, the 11-year-old is absorbing Newtonian science from her scholarly Aunt Isobel. When Walter, acting on a complaint, targets Isobel herself, gutsy Jennet travels to Cambridge to enlist Isaac Newton’s help. Everything goes wrong, first comically, then horribly, for Isobel is burned at the stake, but not before enjoining Jennet to publish a work that will demolish the medieval text (Malleus Maleficarum) that empowered witchfinders and presaged the 1604 Parliamentary Witchcraft Act. Walter has overreached by targeting Isobel, a woman of property, and is exiled to the colonies, along with Jennet and her younger brother Dunstan. Massachusetts is fertile ground for witchfinders; the notorious Salem trials are starting and Dunstan will eventually marry Abigail Williams, that hysterical young accuser. Before Jennet can flee her appalling father and brother, she is abducted by Indians. There follows a pleasantly pastoral time-out before she is rescued by a mailman on horseback. Their consequent marriage fails when their child almost drowns (Jennet was engrossed in Newton). The rollercoaster continues. In Philadelphia, she meets Benjamin Franklin; they become lovers, despite their considerable age difference. They travel to London and meet Newton. Returning home, they are shipwrecked on a Caribbean island. It is here that Nature prompts Jennet’s epiphany, her “demon disproof”; her influential treatise is published by Franklin. Fortune’s wheel turns some more (Jennet engineers her own trial as a witch, big mistake) before witchfinding runs its course and that dreadful statute is repealed.
Morrow’s latest (he’s perhaps best known for The Godhead Trilogy) is commendably ambitious, but this intensely cerebral extravaganza doesn’t really work; Jennet is more a talking head than a fully formed character, and Morrow’s prose, cobwebbed with archaisms, is no help.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-082179-5
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
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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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