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The Furies Kent Family Chronicles John Jakes Books

Download As PDF : The Furies Kent Family Chronicles John Jakes Books

The Furies Kent Family Chronicles John Jakes Books

One of those "I can't put it down books." Starting with the Alamo (a significant historical event), to the California Gold Rush (another significant event), to the eastern US pre-Civil War atmosphere, and the Underground Railroad, this book touches on an unsettled time in American history. But Amanda Kent has an obsession, to regain ownership of her family's book printing business stolen from her mother and stepfather by a New England industrialist named Stovall. But she goes about it with little notice to the damage it causes to her son. Fantastic story, as are all the Kent family chronicles. I read them 40 years ago and have begun now reading them over again, in order, on my kindle.


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The Furies Kent Family Chronicles John Jakes Books Reviews

John Jakes never fails to please and he always teaches you something new about what bravery it took to build America. Heroine Amanda Kent survives and prospers against all odds. If you are a history nut like me, you must read all 8 books in the Kent family chronicles.
--Nancy Anne
Janet Hobhouse's last novel THE FURIES was published two years after her death in 1991, and its incompleteness shows. The work is a thinly fictionalized family memoir of an improvident but glamorous matrilineage living largely on their wits on the edges of Manhattan life throughout the course of the twentieth century; the doomy narrative centers upon the author's alter ego, Helen, who grows up shuttling between home and expensive private schools, watched by her unhappy mother, her artistic grandmother, her odd aunt and great-aunt, and eventually her cold father living in London. The first two-thirds of the work are fantastic--as superb a fictionalized memoir as THE BELL JAR, with each chapter acting as a beautiful short story in its own right, all permeated with the author's singular blend of lush prose and sweetly rueful melancholy. But when Helen marries a wealthy Englishman and her fortunes change drastically the tone of the novel remains exactly the same. When the narrator then uses the same complaining tone she used to describe her mother's mental illness and her father's verbal abusiveness to describe how alien ated she and her husband become for having such much nicer and more expensive houses than their friends, your sympathies for her begin to dry up completely; even when Helen's luck again turns for the worse, she's by then exhausted all the reader's patience. Had Hobhouse had time to finish the work before her early death, she likely would have surmounted these problems in revision; as it is, the work is very flawed but still more than worth reading.
Maybe because I have read 4 these books in a row, in order. But this one is a chore to finish and it may be my last one. It just lacks spark, it drones on and on, and time jumps and it just feels like he had a hard time writing this one. Trying to figure out where he wanted to go and eventually lost interest. I guess if your are stuck in an airport, you might as well read something. That is about how I feel about The Furies.
Once again John Jake's brings to life in print our history. The book is a treasure for those of us who enjoy fiction based upon history. I highly recommend this series.
I took months to read The Furies. I was completely involved in the author's life from page one; I didn't want the book to end since that would have meant abandoning the author, letting her die again. Thankfully, I can take the book off the shelf and read my favorite passages over and over.

Something about the author's urgent voice, her dilemma, her triumph and ultimate loss called to me so compellingly. At many points in her archeology of the self, it seemed Hobhouse was giving me directions about my own life since many of the choices Janet-as-Helen makes are typical of women born in the second half of the 20th-century career, intellectual pursuits, marriage, creating friendships and connections. If I have suggested that The Furies is a woman's journey, I still want to encourage men to read it. This autobiography-as-novel involves the male gender in every way It concerns a girl child's need for a loving mother, the grudging though saving involvement of a remote father, and the rescue that a college education can provide a bright, sensitive, and miserable young woman.

Hobhouse tells The Furies so simply and yet with such microscopic exactitude that I'm trying to figure out how she "did it," how she was able to write about herself with such an uncanny combination of critical distance and compassionate psychological detail. An author has to have deep insights into herself and others as well as make all the best decisions about the writing craft narration and point-of-view, setting and scene changes, and plot development. The tale Hobhouse has given us depends not so much on her craft as on her understanding of the illogic and irrationality of relationships and human desire in general. The striking feature of this novel is Hobhouse's ability to consistently show people during their most characteristically human moments. In the end, Janet/Helen writes about her fight with cancer, "What made me saddest about dying was that I'd never get to meet and love or be loved by anyone else again. . . . [ I would miss ] Not the books unwritten or the places not seen, but the people I was never going to love."

The introduction, by Daphne Merkin, offers important insights into Hobhouse's craft of writing. Even though I don't agree with Merkin that Hobhouse's prose is "baroque" or that her "sentences go on forever," I do agree with her that The Furies is "an exactingly detailed, almost anthropological portrait," an "extraordinary" work. The cover art, a detail from Gary Hume's Water Painting, is another very appropriate choice for this NYRB edition.
This is my second John Jakes novel...but it won't be my last! As a historian, I can appreciate the amount of time Jakes spent on research! As a reader, I found this book hard to put down. I read before going to sleep, but this book kept me up late because I couldn't find a moment 'slow' enough to put the book down for the night! As the book cover indicates, the story begins at the Alamo, but the action keeps going for decades.
One of those "I can't put it down books." Starting with the Alamo (a significant historical event), to the California Gold Rush (another significant event), to the eastern US pre-Civil War atmosphere, and the Underground Railroad, this book touches on an unsettled time in American history. But Amanda Kent has an obsession, to regain ownership of her family's book printing business stolen from her mother and stepfather by a New England industrialist named Stovall. But she goes about it with little notice to the damage it causes to her son. Fantastic story, as are all the Kent family chronicles. I read them 40 years ago and have begun now reading them over again, in order, on my kindle.