Bradstreet Gate
A Novel
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3.1 • 16 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
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
Slow and strange novel!
I just finished reading Bradstreet Gate by Robin Kirman. Bradstreet Gate is basically the story of three people who go to Harvard University and what happens to them after college. We get to follow the story (or lives) of Georgia Calvin (daughter of famous photographer), Charlie Flournoy (son of a working class man), and Alice Kovac (of Serbian descent and very odd). At Harvard Rufus Storrow is a professor of Law and the Colonial State. He is the charismatic, dynamic man who attracts the young college students and has affairs with them. Julie Patel, another student, is murdered and Professor Storrow is suspected of the crime. Ten years later no one has been convicted of the crime. The school is having a reunion and there will be a dedication to Julie. The story goes back and forth to tell what happened while they were at Harvard and what happened to them after they left college.
Bradstreet Gate is a strange novel. I was extremely disappointed. It sounded interesting, but it is definitely not (if you think there is a mystery in this novel, you are wrong)! I did not like any of the characters (they are not the type of people you want to know). The book came across as pretentious and the author liked to use big (my father calls them ten dollar words) words. The book has a lot of foul language and explicit sex scenes. I got to the end of the book and was confused. The book felt unfinished (incomplete). The ending is horrible and made me feel like the whole novel was just pointless (I am very sorry but I am just being truthful). Bradstreet Gate is just a telling of these people’s uninteresting lives. I give Bradstreet Gate 1 out of 5 stars (I really did not like it).
I received a complimentary copy of Bradstreet Gate from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.