A gritty detective story as unflinching as its heroine, rich in well-researched period detail.
An intrepid female medical student stumbles on a conspiracy in Victorian-era Edinburgh.
Sarah Gilchrist is one of a dozen young women braving their first year of medical studies at an unnamed Edinburgh university which has grudgingly admitted them but treats them with contempt. Chaperoned in sequestered classrooms, the women are mocked by male students and professors alike, but Sarah has it worse than most. As a debutante in London’s smarter circles, Sarah was raped at a ball by the son of a lord, then blamed for the attack and banished to a sanatorium for treatment of her "promiscuity." Debut author Welsh lays it on thick in the opening chapters. Sarah’s fellow female students shun her while her repressive aunt and uncle, with whom she lives, preach at her. She rarely encounters a man who doesn't smirk at her. A defter hand would evoke the pathos of Sarah’s situation without lathering the reader in it. Eventually Sarah finds a friend, and the story finds its footing when Sarah recognizes a corpse in dissection class as a young prostitute she encountered in her work at a charitable clinic. Did the girl die by suicide, or was it murder? Sarah’s investigation takes her to the houses of ill repute and opium dens of the less savory side of Edinburgh. Now the game’s afoot! Welsh makes clever use of the conventions of the genre—Sarah has a dull, respectable suitor who the family hopes will lure her from her unsuitable pursuit of education and an irascible, brooding mentor who will reveal a secretly tender heart—while throwing in a twist informed by modern sensibilities. Damp, sooty, moralistic, and sinning Edinburgh is convincingly evoked. A coy reference at the story’s conclusion to another Scottish medical detective hints that this novel may be the first in a series.
A gritty detective story as unflinching as its heroine, rich in well-researched period detail.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-322-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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