Flawed but not without interest—sort of like the Borgias themselves.
Another sojourn with the infamous Borgias from the author of Blood and Beauty (2013).
Since the publication of The Birth of Venus (2003), Dunant has built a solid reputation as a practitioner of historical fiction who specializes in the Italian Renaissance. Even in a period with a surfeit of larger-than-life characters, Pope Alexander VI and his children, Lucrezia and Cesare, stand out, so it’s no surprise that Dunant would revisit this family. Although the material is rich, this isn’t the writer’s best work. There are anachronisms—or, at the very least, moments that lift the reader right out of 16th-century Italy. For example, there’s a “maverick winter snowfall” in the prologue. “Maverick” didn’t become a word until the 19th century, and it is too connected—etymologically and symbolically—with the American West to feel natural in a passage written from the viewpoint of Niccolò Machiavelli. Later, one of Lucrezia’s ladies compares a stoop-backed duke to a question mark. Whether a woman in this time and place would have even been capable of making this analogy is not a settled matter, but it seems unlikely, and, in any case, a storyteller does not want readers pausing to Google the history of punctuation in Italy. These might seem like small matters, but they make it hard to believe in the world Dunant has built. There are other issues endemic to historical fiction, like slightly overripe language and dialogue laden with information that everyone participating in the conversation would surely possess already. However, one of Dunant’s great strengths as a writer is in illuminating the lives of women who were able to amass and wield power despite having no authority. Even during her lifetime, Lucrezia Borgia was turned into a monster by her family’s enemies, and her name is still a byword for feminine villainy. In Dunant’s hands, she is a whole person, and that alone might keep readers captivated.
Flawed but not without interest—sort of like the Borgias themselves.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9697-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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BOOK TO SCREEN
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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