An engaging and unconventional love story.
Two wallflowers bond over books in this debut historical romance.
Lizbeth Trethow is a “determined spinster and future lady’s companion,” but the prospect of a love match changes her mind. Her charming courtship with Roddam begins in a library, where they’ve both sought refuge from a tiresome party. Their shared interest in books arouses Lizbeth’s intellect and sparks her desire, but she has trouble locating her mystery man once they part ways. After an unfortunate mix-up with him and his raffish cousin Drake, the duke of Annick, Lizbeth learns that her Mr. Roddam is actually Sebastian, the earl of Roddam. Her Aunt Hazel says the nobleman is a highly desirable match for a woman of her station, but Lizbeth won’t settle for a marriage of convenience. And Sebastian, who harbors a terrible secret from his childhood, fears emotional intimacy. When he discovers that he and Lizbeth both live in cities connected to King Arthur, Sebastian’s idol, she seems almost too good to be true. Even the frosty dowager duchess begrudgingly approves of her. The historical touches within each decadent ball, the allure of Sebastian’s castle restoration project, and the discussion of old books like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela when they were much newer enhance the 1790 setting. And the mystery of Sebastian’s haunted past lends intrigue to Golden’s series opener long after the couple say I do, expanding its scope. Meanwhile, Lizbeth’s sister, Charlotte, is willing to marry for status. That is, until she weds Drake and finds that she’s lonely. (He may be a rake, but his sense of humor makes him worthy of a second chance in the sequel.) Both romantic plotlines continue well beyond the initial happily-ever-after, offering unexpected twists and further character development. The author adds a few extra ingredients to the romantic formula, with pleasing results.
An engaging and unconventional love story.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73283-420-0
Page Count: 466
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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
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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