MARCH 2019 - AudioFile
Listeners will be fully engaged with Tavia Gilbert's sublime narration, which appreciably enhances this multigenerational story. At 101 years old, Prudence, the daughter of a gardener at Laurelton Hall (Louis Tiffany's mansion) first meets her grandniece, Grace. As they talk, the history of their entire family, and of the times in which they lived, unfolds. Gilbert expertly portrays Prudence's formality and slight hesitations in speech, and Grace's quietly confident and compassionate tone. She does a remarkable job depicting every character, male and female, young and old, with believable accents when warranted. Issues of mortality and art, and the exquisitely rendered details of early-twentieth-century society, with its patriarchal tone and overt class prejudices, are memorably portrayed in this poignant audiobook. M.J. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
12/24/2018
Gornick (Louisa Meets Bear) braids the lives of three generations across a span of 100 years in this vivid novel. In 2013, Prudence Theet is 101, and she meets Grace O’Connor, her great-niece, for the first time. Prudence’s brother Randall had disappeared from his family at the age of 14, and Grace informs Prudence that he had a son. As the two women begin telling each other about their lives, Prudence reaches as far back as the early 1900s, when her parents worked for the famous designer/artist Louis C. Tiffany on Long Island. Prudence recalls Tiffany’s decision to destroy the section of breakwater that fronted his mansion, because local residents wished to reclaim it for public use, and his eccentric Peacock Feast in 1914, in which his children and other children presented roasted peacock to “men of genius”: “On each tray, there’s a peacock, its rainbow plumage... tangled with its porter’s long loose hair.” Grace’s memories are of life with her twin brother, Garcia, after they were born in a 1960s commune and abandoned by their parents to Grandfather Randall, who then raised them. As Grace and Prudence fill in gaps for one another, such as the details of Randall’s disappearance and subsequent life, a withheld memory reemerges from Prudence’s childhood experiences. Gornick’s prose is strong throughout; this is an intricately threaded story of family, secrets, loss, and closure. (Feb.)
From the Publisher
The Best New Books Coming Out Winter 2019”—Southern Living
“Ten Books to Read this February 2019”—BBC-Culture
“Notable New Releases, February 2019”—Publishers Lunch
“Forthcoming Historical Novels for 2019"—Historical Novel Society
“29 of 2019’s Most Amazing Books, TV Shows and Movies to Make Note of Now”—Next Tribe
“The Best New Books for Your Beach Bag in Early 2019”–Acqualina
"The Peacock Feast is one of those rare books that feels both grand and intimate, bringing the reader deeply into a very vivid past. Lisa Gornick has written an engrossing and impressive book."
—Meg Wolitzer
"Fun, trenchant, immersive . . . but on top of that I got historical and psychological mystery, art history, and several different lush settings . . . Exactly the book I needed."
—Rebecca Makkai, Electric Literature
"[An] intricate, emotionally complex and glorious chronicle . . . Swerves and fatal mistakes abound . . . [in] this magical novel."
—Jane Ciabattari, BBC
“A great novel, which [The Peacock Feast] surely is, transports us through time, place and into the souls of its characters . . . Gornick has given her readers a tale suffused with pathos and moral imperative, which tugs kindly and powerfully at our hearts.”
—Lloyd Sederer, New York Journal of Books
"Luxurious . . . It's a book that beckons readers to get lost in its tapestry."
—Jacqueline Cutler, The Star Ledger
“[A] wonderfully complex, many-stranded novel . . . The Peacock Feast is marvelously rich in character, event and locale . . . A thoroughly rewarding novel and, though not terribly long, a truly mighty one.”
—Katherine A. Powers, Newsday
"[An] intricate, psychologically keen work . . . Gornick's enthralling novel moves from the mansions of Oyster Bay to the communes of California, from Europe to America, propelling this wonderful work of fiction through family secrets and mysteries."
—The National Book Review
“A time-switching story that focuses on relationships and character development and not the recitation of historical facts . . . The Peacock Feast doesn’t have the contemporary, fast-paced sense of so many historical novels today, instead embracing an old-fashioned feel. It’s more 'tea in the drawing room' than #wineandbooks on Instagram, with ambling sentences meant to be read and not binged, and a sense of literary leisure at times evocative of the Gilded Age that anchors it."
—Jennifer Klepper, Washington Independent Review of Books
"Gornick braids the lives of three generations across a span of 100 years in this vivid novel . . . [Her] prose is strong throughout; this is an intricately threaded story of family, secrets, loss, and closure."
—Publishers Weekly
"Spanning a century, two coasts, and two continents, this well-researched historical novel is moving and profound."
—Lauren Gilbert, Library Journal
"Delicately weaving Grace's present with Prudence's past, acclaimed novelist Gornick spins an appealing and enthralling family saga."
—Carol Haggas, Booklist
"The deftness of Gornick's talent is visible in the hints and glimpses of the past . . . Finely observed and ultimately redemptive."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Gornick has given us a beautifully written book, complex with characters' stories across four generations. For all the sorrow and heartbreak in her character's lives, we are left with understanding and hope."
—Literate Quilter
“For the thrill of discovering a new favorite author, try Lisa Gornick’s sweeping historical novel The Peacock Feast.”
—Dawn Raffel, NextTribe
"You cannot stop paying attention for a single sentence in this book. It's so beautifully woven . . . A masterpiece."
—Marrie Stone, KUCI, “Writers on Writing”
"The Peacock Feast is a dazzling panorama of a novel—moving from a Tiffany mansion to a gardener’s tenement apartment to a sixties’ commune to a death row unit to an old woman’s beautifully decorated last room. The forces of social history and the forces of personal trauma weave the remarkable plot, and readers will be left applauding."
—Joan Silber, winner of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the 2018 Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction
"An explosive moment that shatters generations, a buried trauma, the unspoken weight of history: In this original and beautifully rendered novel, two women, strangers to each other, hold pieces of a puzzle they can only construct together. Weaving fact and fiction to paint the evolution of a family over the sweep of a century, Lisa Gornick plumbs the connections that transform lives in a book that is both gripping and elegantly nuanced."
—Christina Baker Kline, author of the #1 New York Times Best Seller Orphan Train
MARCH 2019 - AudioFile
Listeners will be fully engaged with Tavia Gilbert's sublime narration, which appreciably enhances this multigenerational story. At 101 years old, Prudence, the daughter of a gardener at Laurelton Hall (Louis Tiffany's mansion) first meets her grandniece, Grace. As they talk, the history of their entire family, and of the times in which they lived, unfolds. Gilbert expertly portrays Prudence's formality and slight hesitations in speech, and Grace's quietly confident and compassionate tone. She does a remarkable job depicting every character, male and female, young and old, with believable accents when warranted. Issues of mortality and art, and the exquisitely rendered details of early-twentieth-century society, with its patriarchal tone and overt class prejudices, are memorably portrayed in this poignant audiobook. M.J. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2018-11-13
Two women, bonded by blood but more importantly by their experiences of crushing loss and retreat from life, find each other before it's too late.
Synthesizing sensitive and soapy, Gornick's (Louisa Meets Bear, 2015, etc.) fourth novel—a chopped-up chronology of a scattered family line—features Prudence O'Connor, age 101 in the present time of this multiera saga, but only 4 on the day of the family tragedy that the novel slowly disinters. Events are set in motion when Grace, Prudence's previously unknown great-niece, turns up on the older woman's Manhattan doorstep, bearing mementos from the past and news about Prudence's brother, Randall, who quit the family for California when he was 14, some nine decades earlier. Prudence and Randall's Irish immigrant parents were servants in the lavish household of glass artist Louis C. Tiffany, and although both Prudence and Randall marry "up," Prudence never loses a sense of her humbler origins. Death visits the book's pages regularly—a parent's early demise; an abortion; a suicide; a fall into a ravine; a shooting; an execution. "What is the purpose of life?" asks Prudence, whose marriage to stiff, upper-class Carlton denies her children and who is too much "a coward of the heart" to grab happiness when it is offered. Randall, meanwhile, had a son, Leopold, the father to Grace and her twin brother, Garcia—another branch of the family tree marked by disappointment and pain. The deftness of Gornick's talent is visible in the hints and glimpses of the past that puncture the rather more rote accounts of the passing generations. The family secret, when finally revealed, is less a surprise than a confirmation of what has been suggested and tidily connects the foundational dots—class, cash, death, regret.
Finely observed and ultimately redemptive, but the gloom and reticence are overwhelming in this old-fashioned, rather too visibly predetermined family drama.
