An entertaining chronology of an infamous ghost and her interactions with European royalty through the centuries.
Debut author Swan explores the legend of the ghost known as the White Lady in a story that mixes historical fact and fiction.
In 13th-century Germany, 29-year-old Countess Cunigunde von Orlamunde is already a widowed mother of two, having wed at 16 a man who died at 55. She enjoys a brief liaison with the burgrave Albert the Handsome, but his parents oppose the match. The distraught countess takes to her bed with her feverish sons. When they die, she’s accused of murder, walled up in a castle dungeon and left to die of hunger and thirst. In subsequent years, members of the House of Hohenzollern witness her ghostly image—a walking, maggot-ridden corpse that they perceive as an omen of impending death. In 1701 Berlin, precocious young Frederick William conducts an informal expedition to find the White Lady’s remains and bury them, but she continues to haunt the family until 1914. The book is an imaginative look at royals’ behind-the-scenes behavior, replete with infighting, jealousy, insults and abuse. It presents a series of vignettes depicting royal family life; for example, at one point, Lt.-Gen. Prince Louis Ferdinand’s mother encourages him to join the army, noting that his death would please both his parents. It also examines the circumstances surrounding the White Lady’s spectral appearances, offering plausible conjecture on why the countess wasn’t at rest. Although she’s a terrifying apparition to sentries (they often faint or flee) and the public at large, she doesn’t frighten on the page, although some may shiver at the supernatural passages. The book has much to say about the long-term effects of cruelty and the blessing of forgiveness. In structure and scope, however, it lacks the sweep and emotional impact of in-depth historical fiction. Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, has a brief cameo near story’s end, but it adds little to an otherwise lively narrative.
An entertaining chronology of an infamous ghost and her interactions with European royalty through the centuries.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0989951005
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Here Be Dragons Press LLC.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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