Another pleasant jaunt down a genealogical rabbit hole.
Third in Riley’s Seven Sisters series (The Storm Sister, 2016, etc.) about adopted daughters in search of their ancestry.
Star, real name Asterope after one of the “seven sisters” of the Pleiades star cluster, has, upon the recent death of her adoptive father, a wealthy Swiss seafarer, returned to her childhood chateau on Lake Geneva to retrieve his legacy to her: a figurine of a black panther, the address of a bookshop in London, and a name, Flora MacNichol. Star has given up dreams of academe to stay close to sister CeCe in London—so symbiotic is their relationship that Star has always been known as CeCe’s shadow. Star visits the bookshop, whose eccentric proprietor, Orlando Forbes, comes from impoverished nobility. When she learns that Flora, her presumed ancestor, may be related to Orlando, she accompanies him to the family seat, High Weald, in Kent, where she meets Orlando’s truculent brother Mouse, their cousin Marguerite Vaughan, and her young son Rory, heir to the estate. Star is immediately drawn to the crumbling hall and the surrounding flora and fauna. She consults journals she finds in the mansion and learns that in 1909, Flora gave up her true love, Archie, Lord Vaughan, to her younger sister Aurelia. For reasons not immediately revealed, Aurelia is the repository of her landed but cash-poor family’s hopes and limited resources, while Flora is treated like a stepchild despite her beauty and talent. (Flora is an animal lover and budding naturalist who will later become a protégé of Beatrix Potter.) After her parents sell their beloved country home to fund Aurelia’s dowry, Flora is sent to live with Mrs. Keppel, a society grand dame rumored to be King Edward’s mistress. With Mrs. Keppel’s help, Flora seems slated for an advantageous but loveless match to a drunken earl. The frame story structure serves this installment well—the past and present narratives are equally engaging. The storytelling is leisurely, almost to excess, then suddenly the stakes heighten as the Forbes-Vaughan connection is illuminated and Star discovers her true heritage and destiny.
Another pleasant jaunt down a genealogical rabbit hole.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5994-4
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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