Flagrant overwriting, derivative plotting: a swashbuckler indeed.
Once again, the prolific Newcomb (coauthor: The Ghosts of Elkhorn, 1982, etc.) rounds up black-hearted villains, lionhearted heroes, and bosomy beauties for his 30-plus action-adventure tale.
It’s 1665, and young Henry Morgan is enslaved in Cuba, wicked Spaniards having carted him off, a mere child, from his native Wales. But he’s now 19, and someone certainly should have known better than to guard only lightly this future scourge of Spanish shipping—or to guard him heavily, for that matter, since it’s clear from the get-go that Henry is the stuff of superheroes, seldom to be fettered by ordinary restraints. So escape he does—in a manner sort of sluffed over by the author—in the process killing some Spaniards, stealing their ship, freeing a passel of pirates, then setting off with them as his unswervingly loyal crew. In due time he becomes “El Tigre de Caribe,” feared up and down the Caribbean—with certain notable exceptions, such as the lovely if tomboyish Nell Jolly, daughter of Morgan’s éminence gris. “Toto” (the Tiger’s pet name for her) adores him. To her considerable dismay, however, she discovers she’s not the only one. The aristocratic Elena Maria de Saucedo—she of the “perfect breasts,” “raven black” hair, “lustrous green eyes,” and “come-hither smile”—is also smitten. Highborn she may be, but trustworthy she’s not, as Henry discovers to his cost when she betrays him to the Dons. They throw him into their slammer, though not for long, of course. Before one can say “brethren of the blood,” he’s freebooting again—sacking Panama City, getting rich, undoing his enemies, marrying his sweetie, and making full sail back to Britain to become a knight of the realm.
Flagrant overwriting, derivative plotting: a swashbuckler indeed.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26197-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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