An engaging twist on a classic opera, lush with drama and romance in a contemporary setting.
Four friends withstand the personal and financial trials of the New York opera scene while performing in La Bohème to break into a first-tier company.
In this novel, Henry Anderson, Stephanie Frank, Jennifer Schneider, and John Bertucci are known by the professional designation Dolci Quattro, or “The Sweet Four.” Bound by their long-standing friendship and devotion to opera since they met at the Manhattan School of Music, they are playing the principal roles in Leoncavallo’s La Bohème, jokingly called “the other La Bohème” because it is infrequently performed compared to the Puccini version. They are passionately committed to opera despite the New York monetary challenges, the cost of private lessons, and the stresses the ascetic lifestyle puts on relationships. Nevertheless, they all struggle. At one point, Henry muses: “I wish I could forget about opera. Then all of my suffering would be over.” Yet they find immense joy in the art form. For Jennifer, “her gift was her life.” If well-attended and praised by critics, this production could be the quartet’s big break. But performing such a controversial version of a beloved piece could mean disaster if not spectacular in vocal quality and execution. The Dolci Quattro members vow to support one another through the emotional turmoil leading up to the opening and the most pivotal moment of their careers. Keith (Remembrance of Blue Roses, 2016) expertly captures the emotional drama and physical exertion of the opera world while employing an intriguing convention: paying homage to La Bohème by mirroring its plot in a modern setting through the Dolci Quattro. The four friends portray the opera principals while simultaneously living like the characters they play, similar to the musical Kiss Me Kate. This lucid tribute extends to cleverly structuring the novel in four acts, broken into scenes rather than chapters. The only misstep: the plot of La Bohème and the story behind its composition aren’t explained until a third of the way through the tale. Despite this flaw, fans of opera and New York fiction should enjoy this appealing homage to the urban bohemian lifestyle.
An engaging twist on a classic opera, lush with drama and romance in a contemporary setting.Pub Date: March 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4835-9198-8
Page Count: 364
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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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