Deborah Donovan

Australian author Peter Carey, winner of the Booker Prize both in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda and 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang, mines the pricey world of modern art in his latest novel, Theft: A Love Story, set in Australia and New York City.

Michael Boone is a formerly famous artist. His biggest collector sets him up as caretaker of his country estate in New South Wales, hoping he'll regain some of his former brilliance. Accompanying Michael is his mentally challenged brother Hugh. Into their somewhat humdrum existence drops Marlene Leibovitz—the daughter-in-law of the famous abstract expressionist, Jacques Leibovitz. Marlene's husband has inherited the right to authenticate his deceased father's works. Marlene's larcenous side leads her to steal and alter real Leibovitz paintings, and to get Michael to produce fakes—no scheme is too over-the-top for Carey's pen.

For the past 15 years Carey has lived in New York; a friendship with an art dealer there led him to reflect on how the value of a work of art is ultimately assessed, and how quickly one style in current favor could be abandoned for another. He sprinkles dollops of tongue-in-cheek satire throughout this novel, skewering everything from dealers who capriciously decide what's in and what's out to exhibitions in department stores.

Carey's tour through the modern art scene has its touching moments, too. Michael constantly worries that Hugh is "dead, drowned, run over, [or] picked up by sick-ohs in a van," and Hugh, though short on brain power, perceptively feels his brother's pain at being out of the artistic limelight.

Readers new to Carey's prose will soon find he is a master of the metaphor, repeatedly offering gems like the one Hugh uses to describe his image appearing in a Polaroid: "like a drowned man floating to the surface of a dam." Carey's latest romp, a winning combination of character study and suspense, should appeal to readers who enjoy literary fiction delivered in a satirical and witty voice.

Deborah Donovan has a master's degree in art history.

Australian author Peter Carey, winner of the Booker Prize both in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda and 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang, mines the pricey world of modern art in his latest novel, Theft: A Love Story, set in Australia and New York City. Michael Boone is a formerly famous artist. His […]

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Feuding sisters vie for immortality

Review by Deborah Donovan

by Deborah Donovan

Following her well-received fictional biography of Cleopatra, Karen Essex's latest novel brilliantly captures the turbulent years of late 15th-century Italy as seen through the eyes of the bold and beguiling Este sisters, whose lives and fates were inextricably woven into the political tapestry of those times.

In 1490, the beautiful and brainy Isabella d'Este of Ferrara, 15, is engaged to Francesco Gonzaga, destined to become the Marquis of Mantua; her younger, homlier sister Beatrice is promised to Ludovico Sforza, the future Duke of Milan. Both marriages are forged solely to cement stronger ties between Ferrara and those more powerful cities. Though Isabella is initially happier in her marriage than Beatrice, she secretly lusts for Ludovico and his political power. The sisters vie constantly with one another, as each triumph in Isabella's life is immediately overshadowed by Beatrice's victory. Above all, Isabella is jealous of the fact that Ludovico is the patron of the famous Leonardo da Vinci; she longs for her beauty to be immortalized by the master of masters. But Ludovico knows he can only commission Leonardo to paint his sister-in-law after he has painted his wife, and Beatrice has no interest in sitting for the artist who has already painted her husband's mistress.

Essex breathes vibrant life into the privileged lives of these two royal families with lavish descriptions of their bejeweled clothing, myriad servants and rooms with lush tapestries and paintings on every wall. The narrative crackles with political intrigue, as Essex carefully outlines the battles between city-states, and the growing animosity between Francesco and Ludovico over France's burgeoning presence in Italy. Of the two sisters, only Beatrice was painted by Leonardo—inserted by him into a mural by a lesser artist on the wall opposite The Last Supper. Though she died in childbirth at age 21, that portrait assured her immortality, leading Essex to bring her short history to life.

Deborah Donovan writes from Cincinnati and La Veta, Colorado.

Fiction, Women's Fiction

Fiction Women's Fiction

Forces of nature

Review by Deborah Donovan

by Deborah Donovan

The Ice Queen is the latest in a long line of 30 years' worth of novels from Alice Hoffman—novels that seamlessly blend magic and reality. It is the tale of a librarian in a small town whose wishes come true, but not always for the best.

When the unnamed narrator is eight years old, and her brother Ned 12, their mother leaves the children alone one night, ostensibly to celebrate her birthday with friends. The narrator wishes her mother, who is raising the children alone after her husband abandoned the family, would disappear—and she dies that night, her car crashing on an icy road. The children go to live with their grandmother; Ned becomes a meteorologist and moves from New Jersey to Florida while his sister goes to library school, still feeling the guilt and self-loathing brought on by her wish the night her mother died.

After suffering a mental breakdown, the narrator goes to Florida with Ned to start work at the local library, but remains obsessed with death until she is struck by lightning. Suddenly her drab life changes dramatically. Suffering heart and neurological damage, she enlists in a study of lightning-strike survivors at the local college. She decides to seek out one such survivor who had been struck dead, then came back to life Lazarus Jones. They embark on a strange and erotic relationship fueled by their ability to share secrets that have kept each of them estranged from most other people for years. In her signature style, Hoffman describes their powerful desire for one another as a force of nature, brought on by the trauma each experienced both before and after their lightning episodes.

Hoffman confronts death and dying, and the significance of the "now," finally allowing her narrator to feel lucky for what she has. In her unique way she imbues seemingly mundane issues with a touch of magic, and in so doing brings her unique and endearing characters vividly to life.

Deborah Donovan writes from Cincinnati and La Veta, Colorado.

Debut Fiction, Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction Debut Fiction

East meets West in a sensitive debut

Review by Deborah Donovan

by Deborah Donovan

A cornucopia of stories, woven intricately together by one exquisite painting, flows throughout Nina Schuyler's debut novel, each one dependent on the other, yet shining on its own. The Painting opens in Japan in 1870, when the country was beginning to cast off its centuries of isolation and open itself to western influence. Hayashi, a crippled potter who now exports his bowls to France, and his young wife Ayoshi, who struggles to maintain her loveless, arranged marriage, live just outside Tokyo. Ayoshi privately mourns the loss of her lover, Urashi, and their baby, whom her father forced her to abort. Her paintings of herself and Urashi, done in secret and kept hidden, somehow alleviate her grief and allow her to navigate the sad reality her life has become.

On the other side of the world, Jorgen, a Danish soldier and volunteer for France in the Franco-Prussian War, is running from his own failures at home. After losing a leg in battle, he hunkers down in Paris, taking a job with Pierre, the brother of one of his fallen comrades, in his black market enterprise. There, while unwrapping one of Hayashi's bowls, Jorgen discovers a delicately rendered painting of two Japanese lovers. Drawn by the beauty of the painting and its emotional message, Jorgen stashes it away, never telling Pierre of its existence.

Schuyler deftly employs her secondary characters to represent opposing views a young Buddhist monk descends on Hayashi and Ayoshi's home and secretly holds ancient Buddhist ceremonies there at the same time another guest extols the virtues of casting off the past in favor of commerce with the burgeoning markets of the West. And in Paris, Jorgen's boss Pierre gets rich from his sleazy business ventures while his sister, whom he calls a "dangerous idealist," joins the army to support her country's cause.

Ultimately, all are affected in various ways by the painting Ayoshi has so carefully dispatched to the new world, a world she eventually joins. Packed with historic detail and musings on the bond between emotions and artistic endeavor, Schuyler's novel is an illuminating and sensitive debut.

Deborah Donovan writes from Cincinnati and La Veta, Colorado.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Hardscrabble lives on the Great Plains

Review by Deborah Donovan

by Deborah Donovan

Set in the isolated and fictitious town of Minerva, Minnesota, in the 1920s, Sharratt's luminous second novel captivates the reader from the first page with an intriguing tale of three strong women who struggle against the choking repression of both the town and the times in which they live.

The relationship between 15-year-old Penny and her mother Barbara, who is only 30, has been deteriorating since Penny became aware of Barbara's "dirty" affair with her employer Laurence Hamilton, for whom she cooks and cleans. Hamilton's wife has been in a coma-like state, a victim of the Spanish flu epidemic, for four years and lives in a nursing home in the neighboring town. Though her mother seems oblivious to the local gossip, Penny feels the town's condemnation wherever she goes; she retaliates by answering an ad for a hired hand placed by Cora Egan, a mysterious, pregnant newcomer to Minerva. Penny fortuitously arrives on the day that Cora's daughter Phoebe is born, and the lives of these three immediately become inextricably woven.

Home-schooled by Cora, Penny gains knowledge of science and literature, even identifying with Penelope of the Odyssey, who demonstrates the same determined individuality that Penny so admires in Cora. Gradually, Penny learns more and more details of Cora's past as a debutante and wife of a surgeon, and discovers why she now takes such pains to disguise her femininity by cutting her hair and dressing like a man. Tensions begin to build as both Cora's and Barbara's hidden lives seem destined to be explosively revealed, threatening both the strong bonds the women have created and the stable lives toward which they've been working.

Sharratt perceptively portrays the simultaneous freedom and repression of the 1920s, and poetically imbues even the most mundane chores with significance. As she did in her well-received first novel, Summit Avenue, Sharratt has again drawn on her Minnesota roots to bring a small, seemingly placid town to unpredictable life.

Deborah Donovan writes from Cincinnati and La Veta, Colorado.

Debut Fiction, Fiction

Fiction Debut Fiction

A Chinese odyssey

Review by Deborah Donovan

by Deborah Donovan

John Dalton's debut novel, Heaven Lake, is an ambitious compilation of a coming-of-age tale, a travelogue, and a probe into the role of fate in individual destiny.

Recent college graduate Vincent Saunders leaves his small Illinois town to serve as a missionary in Taiwan. He manages to convert one of his rooming house boarders, but strikes out with the other, a Scot with a fondness for both smuggling and smoking hashish. Vincent's troubles begin when he moves to his own rent-free ministry house in the small town of Toulio. For extra cash, he teaches English to small groups, including a class of high school girls; his brief, guilt-ridden affair with one student leads to his brutal beating, and the need for his immediate departure. Consequently, Vincent takes up the offer of the wealthy Mr. Gwa to travel to the mainland, marry Kai-Ling, the young girl he covets, return with her to Taiwan, and then divorce her, leaving Gwa free to marry her himself. Travel restrictions prevent Gwa from carrying out his dream, and he is willing to pay Vincent $10,000 to do it for him.

Vincent sets out on a half-year odyssey to the northwest corner of China a journey proving to be as personally fulfilling as it is culturally and geographically edifying. He endures countless delays and endless train rides, but gradually realizes this adventure might actually become "the one exceptional undertaking of his life." He begins to soak in every detail, from the vast tenements of Lanzhou to the indescribable beauty of Heaven Lake, in the mountains near the home of his bride-to-be. He deals with corrupt ticket-hawkers, thieves, and eventually the duplicitous Kai-Ling, who can't seem to decide whether to marry Vincent or not.

Like Vincent, Dalton spent several years in Taiwan, where he gained insight into the Chinese habits and mores he perceptively infuses into his vivid characters. After adding his ruminations on marriage, commitment, and self-enlightenment, the end result is this auspicious and compelling first novel. Deborah Donovan writes from Cincinnati and La Veta, Colorado.

John Dalton's debut novel, Heaven Lake, is an ambitious compilation of a coming-of-age tale, a travelogue, and a probe into the role of fate in individual destiny. Recent college graduate Vincent Saunders leaves his small Illinois town to serve as a missionary in Taiwan. He manages to convert one of his rooming house boarders, but […]

Debut Fiction, Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction Debut Fiction

Liza Ward

Interview by Deborah Donovan

by Deborah Donovan

The traditional true-crime novel often takes the form of an introspective look at the criminal, focusing on aberrations in upbringing that might lead to a life of crime. Liza Ward's provocative debut, Outside Valentine, detours intriguingly from this formula, for she delves into the lives not only of her protagonists, but also of the people related to the victims. She dissects not just the horror of these real-life crimes, but the more subtle, rippling effects on those left behind.

Three seemingly unrelated stories set apart in time and place gradually come together as the author reveals relationships previously hidden. In the opening section, set in 1991 Manhattan, the reader meets Lowell, an antiquities dealer who is still troubled by the violent demise of his parents years ago. He avoids interacting with his two grown children, who have finally given up on him, but his wife Susan continues to try to snap him out of his malaise.

Then the scene shifts to 1957 Nebraska, where 14-year-old Caril Ann Fugate first meets Charlie Starkweather, standing behind her house with his .22 in his hand a whisper of the way things would go. Months later, the two are captured by police in a barn just outside Valentine, Nebraska, having left a bloody trail of 11 dead, including Caril Ann's mother, baby sister and stepfather. Two years later, a girl nicknamed Puggy and her family move to Lincoln, where Puggy makes friends with a girl whose neighbors were killed by Starkweather. Puggy becomes obsessed with the murders, and with the couple's son, Lowell, who was at boarding school when the tragedy occurred. The author deftly portrays Puggy's feelings of worthlessness when her mother deserts the family, and the reader begins to see similarities with Caril Ann's depressing home situation before Starkweather arrived on the scene.

Ward, who has garnered awards for her short stories, weaves together these three seemingly autonomous plots in intricate ways. In doing so, she has created an evocative tale of the power of love to both create, and destroy. Deborah Donovan writes from Cincinnati and La Veta, Colorado.

The traditional true-crime novel often takes the form of an introspective look at the criminal, focusing on aberrations in upbringing that might lead to a life of crime. Liza Ward's provocative debut, Outside Valentine, detours intriguingly from this formula, for she delves into the lives not only of her protagonists, but also of the people […]