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Summary
Summary
"My name is Jude. And because of Law, Hey and the Obscure, they thought I was a boy."
Jude is twenty-one when she flies in a private plane to Sark, a tiny carless Channel Island and the last place in Europe to abolish feudalism. She's been hired for the summer to tutor a rich local boy named Pip. But when Jude arrives, the family is unsettling. Pip is awkward, overly literal, and adamant he doesn't need a tutor, and upstairs, his enigmatic mother Esmé casts a shadow over the house.
Enter Sofi: the family's holiday cook, a magnetic, mercurial Polish girl with appalling kitchen hygiene, who sings to herself and sleeps naked. When the father of the family goes away on business, Pip's science lessons are replaced by midday rosé and scallop-smuggling, and summer begins. Soon something powerful starts to touch the three together.
But those strange, golden weeks on Sark can't last forever. Later, in Paris, Normandy and London, they find themselves looking for the moment that changed everything.
Compelling, sensual, and lyrical, The Last Kings of Sark by Rosa Rankin-Gee is a tale of complicated love, only children and missed opportunities, from an extraordinary new writer.
Author Notes
ROSA RANKIN-GEE grew up in Kensal Rise, London, but now lives by the Parc de Belleville in Paris. She's been named one of Esquire magazine's 75 Brilliant Young Brits', and in 2011, she won Shakespeare & Company's international Paris Literary Prize. Rosa runs a night-bird version of a Book Club, where up to 300 people come to swap books and drink cocktails in the former home of George Bizet. Her work has been profiled in the New York Times and The New Yorker among others. She is twenty-seven.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
After her graduation from St. Andrews in Scotland, a woman named Jude finds a summer job tutoring a 16-year-old boy on the tiny English Channel Island of Sark, where cars are illegal, the locals drive around on tractors, and feudalism existed until 2008. The Defoe family is as strange as the island: Eddy, the patriarch, is rarely home; his wife, Esme, almost never leaves her room and appears to subsist entirely on sparkling water; and their son, Pip, despite being a bright boy whose knowledge outstrips Jude's, has no intention of completing the college exams for which she is allegedly preparing him. Jude is immediately drawn to Sofi, the family's beautiful 19-year-old cook, and soon Jude, Sofi, and Pip are inseparable. Over the course of a magical summer, there's very little tutoring and not a lot of cooking, but plenty of bicycling, night swimming, wine drinking, and bonding, in ways none of them anticipated. A few years later, all three have fallen out of touch, but each still struggles to fully understand the ways the summer, and their friendship, changed the courses of their lives. Rankin-Gee's prose moves with a languid pace that vividly showcases Sark's -as well as her characters'-peculiarities. Though the plot meanders and the island is populated with stock characters, hidden surprises and a beautifully written, bittersweet ending pack a vivid emotional punch.. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Some debut novels are unexceptional coming-of age-stories, others show talent and flair. Happily Rosa Rankin-Gee's lithe, shimmering novel falls into the latter category. Its primary action, which takes place in a few transformative summer weeks in the lives of three young people on the remote Channel island of Sark, holds irresistible tension. A 21-year-old graduate is flown in a merchant banker's private plane for a short season of tutoring his teenage son. This aura of privilege is countered immediately with the kind of raffish pragmatism that only the very wealthy can pull off - the plane's only other cargo being frozen meat and three crates of Badoit. Rankin-Gee invests her characters with ambiguity from the start, as the book opens on a gentle Shakespearean gender mix-up which will shade the whole story with paradoxical quirks: "My name is Jude. And because of Law, Hey and the Obscure, they thought I was a boy. Not even a boy. A young man . . . " Jude's reluctant charge is Pip, a nervous, fantastically bright 16-year-old who won't meet her eye. Father Eddy is a florid public-school bore; French mother Esme is rarely glimpsed, and silently inhabits the upper reaches of the house, an elusive, birdlike Miss Havisham or Bertha Rochester-type figure. Eddy and Esme are only children who have produced an only child; this coincidence includes Jude, and the other person who will make up a fiercely intense triumvirate with her and Pip: Sofi, the hired cook. "Polish," states Eddy dismissively. "Ealing," insists Sofi. Sofi is the focal point, their unacknowledged leader - "after her stories, ours seemed drawn in the dimmest pencil" - despite her lower status in the pecking order of the household. As staff, she and Jude live out, sharing a basic twin-bedded room in a forlorn establishment that barely passes muster as a hotel. Sofi's frankness, adroit malapropisms and filthy epithets make Jude, the elder by two years, feel immature and awkward, as do the younger woman's unabashed sexiness and boldness: "dirty blonde, dirty tan, denim-blue eyes". The first night Sofi undresses like an unspoken challenge: "She whipped off her top mid-sentence and sat on the edge of the bed, legs open, in a black lace bra." Rankin-Gee lavishes as much attention on her descriptions of Sark as she does on the golden Sofi. It's an intriguing setting for a novel, this tiny island, rising "out of the sea like a souffle" - the last feudal state in Europe, just two square miles in area, with a population of around 600, where cars are banned and the content of meals depends on what erratically delivered supplies appear in the local store. The fairly recently departed feudalism is less than subtly present in Eddy's domain; sharp-witted Sofi's initial disdain for Jude is due to the fact that "I was wearing a suit and using the voice I saved for my parents' friends." Sofi uses bravado to cover her lack of formal education, but Jude is something of a fraudulent tutor who doesn't know her Borges from her Hemingway. When Eddy leaves for a business trip, the summer slides into recklessness. Lessons are abandoned, scallop trawled for illegally with Czech casual workers, rose drunk at noon and rickety bike rides taken in the dark, with Jude always following Sofi's "red bindi" of a backlight. The idyll ends explosively, but also with extreme tenderness, an unforgettable finale to those grubby, prelapsarian weeks. The novel's extended coda shows Sofi, Pip and Jude at separate moments of their lives two, five and many years later. Sark dwindles or enlarges by turn to become a symbol of heady remembrance, as the story resumes in a rough Normandy bar, the heart of Paris and, later, in England. Reality shows its inevitable face in random deaths and alliances. Rankin-Gee evokes well the locked-in misery of a small, chatteringly anxious child, the loneliness of single parenthood, the sense of futility which can come through never quite making it; all this makes up for the authorial gaucheness in some later scenes. The instant nostalgia particular to youth is a recurring theme, and in the strong sensuality, witty dialogue and white-heat-forged friendships there is some similarity to Geoff Dyer's 90s classic Paris Trance. Rankin-Gee won legendary bookshop Shakespeare and Company's international Paris literary prize for a version of this book, and it is suffused throughout with love for that city. To order The Last Kings of Sark for pounds 11.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk. - Catherine Taylor Caption: Captions: 'Rising out of the sea like a souffle' . . . the tiny island of Sark [Sofi] is the focal point, their unacknowledged leader - "after her stories, ours seemed drawn in the dimmest pencil" - despite her lower status in the pecking order of the household. As staff, she and [Jude] live out, sharing a basic twin-bedded room in a forlorn establishment that barely passes muster as a hotel. Sofi's frankness, adroit malapropisms and filthy epithets make Jude, the elder by two years, feel immature and awkward, as do the younger woman's unabashed sexiness and boldness: "dirty blonde, dirty tan, denim-blue eyes". The first night Sofi undresses like an unspoken challenge: "She whipped off her top mid-sentence and sat on the edge of the bed, legs open, in a black lace bra." The fairly recently departed feudalism is less than subtly present in [Eddy]'s domain; sharp-witted Sofi's initial disdain for Jude is due to the fact that "I was wearing a suit and using the voice I saved for my parents' friends." Sofi uses bravado to cover her lack of formal education, but Jude is something of a fraudulent tutor who doesn't know her Borges from her Hemingway. When Eddy leaves for a business trip, the summer slides into recklessness. Lessons are abandoned, scallop trawled for illegally with Czech casual workers, rose drunk at noon and rickety bike rides taken in the dark, with Jude always following Sofi's "red bindi" of a backlight. The idyll ends explosively, but also with extreme tenderness, an unforgettable finale to those grubby, prelapsarian weeks. - Catherine Taylor.
Kirkus Review
The past and present join together in a tale of a summer love that weaves its tendrils around three young hearts and still grows there decades later.Its the summer before 16-year-old Pip goes to university, and his father has hired two girls to spend July and August at their home on Sarka British Channel island off the coast of Normandy. Twenty-one-year-old Jude arrives to tutor Pip; Sofi, 19, becomes the familys cook. Pips ailing mother seldom ventures downstairs, so when Pips father is away on business, the three free themselves from responsibilities and explore the island and grow close. Summer drifts by and ends in a confused tanglea hot, melted knotthe day before Jude flies home. Thus ends the first 29 chapters, originally written as a novella for which Rankin-Gee received the Shakespeare and Co. prize (2011); they reveal her ability to create vital characters and paint wonderfully with words. The three young people are well-drawn, and the dialogue is fresh and vibrant, but the story lacks a strong plot; it's a cerebral tale made up of Judes thoughts and sharp observations but one that lacks forward momentum. Later, Rankin-Gee added additional chapters, giving readers a peek into the subsequent lives of Jude, Sofi and Pip, each still affected by their long-ago summer on Sark. Alternating chapters narrated by each of the three characters serve to address the unasked question at the end of the first half of the novel: So who loved whom, exactly? But there's an odd sense of disjointedness: Answers are hinted at, alluded to, leaving the reader to make leaps; and though the final chapters provide some closure, they raise as many questions as they answerwhich isnt necessarily a bad thing.Readers who enjoy a slower-paced novel will find this character-driven tale interesting and thought-provoking. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Jude was hired to be Pip's summer tutor, but she ended up being so much more than that. She learned far more than she ever taught how to climb a tree and flirt with Czech boys and drink wine straight from the bottle. Thrown together in shared employment on the tiny island of Sark, Jude and Sofi, the family's cook, quickly bond as roommates and coconspirators. Pip's lessons fall by the wayside as he and Sofi and Jude embark on a magical summer of exploring. Once the summer comes to an end, the three continue on their ways, both on paths they expected to travel and some that are entirely new. Even as their lives stretch further and further apart, memories of the summer they shared on Sark remain. Rankin-Gee's tactile, mellifluous prose is on full display here, as the tiniest details help fully immerse readers in the otherworldly island setting. This enthralling debut full of deep, unshakable bonds, twists of fate, and the power of nostalgia will be an exciting find for fans of Elin Hilderbrand and Meg Wolitzer.--Turza, Stephanie Copyright 2010 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Jude is not a boy, despite notable males ("Law, Hey, and the Obscure") who share her name, leading her employer, a family on the Channel Island of Sark, to think otherwise. This gender-swapping misdirection kicks off an exploration of sexual identity and upended expectations. Seemingly obvious foreshadowing brings about surprising but believable twists, and a straightforward approach to sex as both deeply intimate and as humdrum as any quotidian need firmly establishes a new normal for romantic literature. Rankin-Gee's almost painfully perceptive observations on the bliss of being on an emotional and physical island-and the misery of leaving it behind-are sure to send readers into contemplation of loves long gone and left more appreciative of them. As in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, the narrator's awareness of story-telling conventions create opportunities to reflect on how memories form, and fans of Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife will enjoy the ebb and flow of time. VERDICT Debut author Rankin-Gee's keen insights into romantic negotiations belie her youth. The confident narrative will be a shot in the arm for bored book club planners, and the fluid sexuality will be a welcome (if overdue) offering for readers of LGBT fiction.-Nicole R. Steeves, Chicago P.L. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
