The second installment in one of the most deeply curious works of modern fiction: a romantic celebration of the South in the period leading up to the Civil War, by an acclaimed American writer who has spent most of his life living abroad. Green, born in Paris in 1900, grew up listening to the tales of the Old South told by his mother, raised in Virginia. During his long and prolific career, he has published a number of powerful, somber novels, plays, and a series of acclaimed memoirs and diaries. But he never forgot his mother's stories of an elegant, untroubled life in the Old South. The first volume in the ongoing series, The Distant Lands (1991), was published in France in the 1980s and became a phenomenal bestseller. His protagonist, Elizabeth Escridge, is a beautiful, willful, deeply romantic Englishwoman. The story followed the adolescent Elizabeth's rather complex romantic entanglements, centered around a Georgia plantation, and culminating in a duel in which her former lover and her husband kill each other. Now, Green traces her still tempestuous life in the years leading up to the outbreak of war, as she attempts to conform to the intricacies of high-society life in Savannah, raise her son, unravel some family mysteries, and resist the romantic advances of various dashing gentlemen. She marries a cousin, only to lose him in the war's first major battle. Despite the overheated drama, this is no Gone With the Wind: Green can write, and he knows how to set a large, shrewdly detailed cast in motion. The gothic plot (of betrayals, frustrated loves, grim secrets) is lively and inventive. But this is a world without larger moral dimensions: Slavery is kept largely offstage, and Green, sadly, really does seem to believe, as the narrative notes, that the gentlemanly, put-upon South was merely ``defending its lands'' in a war that took 600,000 lives. A troubling, oddly outdated work.
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1996
ISBN: 0-7145-2985-0
Page Count: 651
Publisher: Marion Boyars
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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