Clearly, Keneally’s sympathies lie firmly with Napoleon and the Balcombes, as will the reader’s.
Napoleon’s last exile on the island of St. Helena as related by a British teenager who befriended him.
First, we witness the painful death of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose suffering is raised to the level of punishment by the grisly ministrations of drunken and or/quack physicians. The suspense does not lie in what happens to Napoleon but in how he gets to this pass. That is a story told with as much meandering as St. Helena’s mountain roads by Betsy Balcombe, teenage younger daughter of William Balcombe, who's employed by the East India Company as a provisioner of goods on the island. When he's first brought to St. Helena, Napoleon, known variously according to one’s patriotic bent as the Ogre, OGF (Our Great Friend), the Emperor, or the General, is kept under very commodious house arrest in a guesthouse of the Balcombe residence, the Briars. There, an affinity grows between him and Betsy, nurtured by reciprocal childish pranks and a mutual interest in horsemanship. With a small French entourage and a brimming larder supplied by the East India Company, Napoleon maintains a semblance of court life. The plot drags, though, as the book details Betsy’s growing pains. Gradually she becomes aware of male suitors and also of her superior attractiveness vis-à-vis her long-suffering older sister, Jane. Her incipient womanhood threatens her cherished identity as a hellion, and she’s disillusioned when a resentful admirer tells her that Napoleon was overheard extolling her feminine charms. There are far deeper disillusionments and betrayals to come. St. Helena’s new British governor, Sir Hudson Lowe (in “Name and Nature,” as he is dubbed by Betsy) arrives determined to make sure that Napoleon’s exile more closely resembles jail. The strictures he places on the emperor and his ruinous allegations against William Balcombe for befriending him bring about the novel’s dispiriting and attenuated denouement. The faux regency prose is convincing without being unduly daunting.
Clearly, Keneally’s sympathies lie firmly with Napoleon and the Balcombes, as will the reader’s.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2842-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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BOOK REVIEW
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