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jennyyates 's review for:
New York
by Edward Rutherfurd
If you like a lot of history with your fiction, you’ll like this book. It’s very thoroughly researched, and it reads like a time-lapsed photograph of New York dating from the 16th century to the present. You can see the buildings grow, the town change, the various ethnic groups make their entrances, and the power centers shift.
In terms of its fictional appeal, it’s on the weak side. In order to cover so much territory, it moves from one generation to the next with great speed. It focused mainly on a rich white family, the Masters family, going from father to son. There are side-stories dealing with indigenous Americans, Dutch, Irish, Italians, and Jews, and an African-American family is tracked for a few generations. The latter was actually one of the more interesting story-lines but was dropped rather abruptly.
Some of the characters stand out, but many of them are a little blurry. Wealth – the gaining and losing of it – is a recurring theme, and the novel is full of very detailed descriptions of the way New York’s richest have lived through the centuries. One of the last stories has a rather moralistic ending, with the message that it isn’t healthy to be driven entirely by one’s ambition for money and prestige. But the message is thin in contrast to everything that’s come before.
In terms of its fictional appeal, it’s on the weak side. In order to cover so much territory, it moves from one generation to the next with great speed. It focused mainly on a rich white family, the Masters family, going from father to son. There are side-stories dealing with indigenous Americans, Dutch, Irish, Italians, and Jews, and an African-American family is tracked for a few generations. The latter was actually one of the more interesting story-lines but was dropped rather abruptly.
Some of the characters stand out, but many of them are a little blurry. Wealth – the gaining and losing of it – is a recurring theme, and the novel is full of very detailed descriptions of the way New York’s richest have lived through the centuries. One of the last stories has a rather moralistic ending, with the message that it isn’t healthy to be driven entirely by one’s ambition for money and prestige. But the message is thin in contrast to everything that’s come before.