A compelling historical setting and subject hampered by awkward prose.
In this third installment of a mystery series, a 19th-century San Francisco attorney and detective leads an investigation into abusive practices at an insane asylum.
In San Francisco in 1887, an unusual crew occupies 1 Nob Hill, the mansion built by railroad magnate Mark Hopkins. His widow, Mary, lives there but has dementia and serves as “benefactress” to the other occupants: Clara Foltz, California’s first female lawyer, a single mother, and the true head of the household; her brood of children; and her best friend, Ah Toy, a former Chinatown madam. With some help—including psychic assistance—the group has solved some difficult cases. Now Clara’s daughter Bertha May, 17, is pretending to be mentally unstable at the Stockton State Insane Asylum, where her friend Polly Bedford, 12, has been committed by her parents after witnessing the murder of Winnifred Cotton, 10, a Nob Hill neighbor. Bertha’s mission is to discover what Polly really saw, and the whole team wants to expose illegal commitments targeting wives, children, and immigrants. To that end, they form a citizens’ committee as the public face of the investigation while continuing undercover work. What they discover goes beyond the iniquities of false commitments into some bizarre territory—including spiritualism, telepathy, conjoined twins, and elaborate experiments carried out by eugenicists Francis Galton and Dr. Emil Kraepelin. Can justice be served? Musgrave (The Spiritualist Murders, 2018, etc.) has some potent ingredients in this fantastical stew, spiced with many real-life figures, like Foltz, Toy, Galton, Kraepelin, and Elizabeth Packard, who helped reform commitment laws in the 1860s after being confined to an asylum when she questioned her husband’s opinions. The setting is atmospheric and the subject, captivating. But clumsy writing (“Their diaphragms undulating their bosoms”), a painful German accent (“Bzychozis can ofden pe proken ven zee badient exberiences zee traumatic effent akain”), anachronisms (the terms “sexist” and “racist”), and murky paranormal phenomena mar the story. And, despite their association with eugenics, Galton and Kraepelin don’t deserve such grotesque caricatures.
A compelling historical setting and subject hampered by awkward prose.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-943457-38-0
Page Count: 289
Publisher: EMRE Publishing Fiction
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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