The power of the author’s previous historical fiction came largely from a meticulous sense of historical detail missing in...
Beijing-born novelist and painter Shan Sa (Empress, 2006, etc.) imagines the life of Alexander the Great in terms of his impassioned love affair with an Amazon warrior queen.
Educated by Aristotle, Alexander wants to be a poet, but he follows in the footsteps of his father Philip of Macedonia. By the time Alexander rises to military preeminence, conquering Egypt and Babylon, he is the sun around which orbits a coterie of boyhood lovers/admirers. In this warrior society, romance and desire are reserved for other men while women are merely baby-makers. Alexander’s first love, his schoolmate Hephaestion, remains loyal even after Alexander takes Darius of Babylon’s former slave Bagoas as his new lover. Meanwhile on the Scythian steppes, the Amazons have evolved into a tribe of fierce women who live without men. One day Alexander finds himself in a one-on-one battle, unaware that his opponent is the Amazon queen Talestria. The two carry on their fight night and day until they recognize they are soul mates and decide to wed. After Alexander changes Talestria’s name to Alestria, her servant Tania is horrified that her queen chooses love over war while Bagoas goes wild with jealousy. Alexander finds himself torn by extreme passions, his thirst for conquest overcome by his love for Alestria and his desire to bear a child with her. Despite Tania’s efforts to keep Alestria sterile, she becomes pregnant. Tania is horrified as Alestria seems to wither away toward motherhood, but after the child is stillborn, Alestria demands that Alexander take her with him to the front. There Alexander suffers a fatal head wound but does not die immediately. Leaving behind a double in his place, he goes with Alestria to the Steppes, where she nurses him and where he has the chance to live without hatred.
The power of the author’s previous historical fiction came largely from a meticulous sense of historical detail missing in this artifice, which never comes to mythological or fictional life.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-154354-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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