A long, bloody, vastly entertaining story.
The heroic stand of the Knights of St. John against the much larger army of Islamic invaders in 16th-century Malta gets epic treatment in the first, fat volume of a projected trilogy.
British psychiatrist, screenwriter and novelist Willocks (Bloodstained Kings, 1998, etc.) portrays Renaissance warfare with gusto, stirring the depravity of the Inquisition into the siege of Malta, where Suleiman the Magnificent has sent his vast armies to obliterate the Knights Hospitaller of St. John, a monastic order with a power base nearly as rich as the pope’s. The story hangs on the broad shoulders of Mattias Tannhauser, son of a German blacksmith, who was abducted and adopted by raiding Moslems, giving him vast insight into both Christian and Moslem viewpoints in the unsettled world of the Mediterranean. Tannhauser is lured to the island fortress by the ravishing Franco-Maltese countess Carla La Penautier, who hopes the currently retired warrior will leave the pleasures of his present life as a Sicilian merchant to locate somewhere in Malta the illegitimate son who was snatched from her when she was 15. Tannhauser, bewitched by Carla, takes on the job, unaware that the missing lad’s father is the brilliant Dominican inquisitor Ludovico Ludovici, himself headed for Malta, for his own evil reasons. Colluding with the supremely cynical Cardinal Michele Ghisleri, Ludovico plans to bring the too-independent Knights permanently to heel, subjecting them to the will of his patron, who will one day be known as Pius V. The two protagonists are plunged into the lopsided battle between the vastly outnumbered Maltese and the supremely confident armies of the Sultan, all the while carrying on their own private battle to the death. Stone walls crumble, war machines rumble, bodies fill the ditches, and once in a while there’s some terrific sex.
A long, bloody, vastly entertaining story.Pub Date: May 15, 2007
ISBN: 0-374-24865-6
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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