Bradstreet Gate
A Novel
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
A tour de force about three friends affected by a campus murder, for readers of Donna Tartt, Meg Wolitzer, and Jeffrey Eugenides
Georgia, Charlie and Alice each arrive at Harvard with hopeful visions of what the future will hold. But when, just before graduation, a classmate is found murdered on campus, they find themselves facing a cruel and unanticipated new reality. Moreover, a charismatic professor who has loomed large in their lives is suspected of the crime. Though his guilt or innocence remains uncertain, the unsettling questions raised by the case force the three friends to take a deeper look at their tangled relationship. Their bond has been defined by the secrets they’ve kept from one another—Charlie’s love and Alice’s envy, Georgia’s mysterious affair—and over the course of the next decade, as they grapple with the challenges of adulthood and witness the unraveling of a teacher's once-charmed life, they must reckon with their own deceits and shortcomings, each desperately in search of answers and the chance to be forgiven.
A relentless, incisive, and keenly intelligent novel about promise, disappointment, and the often tenuous bonds of friendship, Bradstreet Gate is the auspicious debut of a tremendously talented new writer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kirman's debut novel artfully toys with the complexities of deception, loyalty, and friendship as three Ivy League students and a professor become prime suspects in the murder of a student at their school, Julie Patel. Awash in flashbacks and memories, Julie's classmates recall their own histories and the events leading up to her murder. Beautiful, spoiled Georgia Calvin was embroiled in a clandestine and hastily terminated affair with Harvard professor Rufus Storrow, a man with a military past and a disdain for the kind of disrespectful interruptions that Julie made in class. Elitist Charlie Flournoy admired Storrow and became smitten with Georgia, yet he never got any further than her flirtations. And then there's Alice Kovac, the emotional tinderbox who had a curiously affectionate friendship with Georgia. With firm ties to the victim and the suspects alike, Storrow is at the center of all the melodramatic developments and is a shifty candidate for Julie's murderer. In focused yet perhaps overly descriptive prose, Kirman describes the messy decade following Julie's murder and the ways it impacted the lives and loves of all three students. Though correlations to Donna Tartt's classic The Secret History seem inevitable, Kirman's complex, serpentine yarn has teeth of its own, and it will find a welcome home in many beach bags this summer.
Customer Reviews
Bradstreet Gate (Review)
It might be 3 stars tomorrow, but I'm too mad at Robin Kirman right now, and they say never to review angry (or is that drunk?).
[The next day]
Okay, 3 stars, the more I think about it. See my full review at:
spinningjennysbookblog.blogspot.ca