Three ambitious high school graduates enter Harvard in the fall of 1993. By the time they graduate four years later, their lives have been forever changed by the murder of one of their classmates and their involvement in a web that connects them to the man suspected of murdering her. Robin Kirman's first novel is a complex and sophisticated character study of three young people who must deal with a troubled past while navigating the perilous path into adulthood.
Georgia Calvin, Charlie Flournoy and Alice Kovac aren't the typical super-achievers who emerge from the tiny funnel that allows the anointed a place in Harvard's freshman class. Each has had to overcome some form of serious family dysfunction to make it to Cambridge, and each approaches the four years on campus with a dramatically different picture of what eventual success will look like. But whatever their plans, they're altered irrevocably by their relationship with housemaster Rufus Storrow. Storrow is a West Point graduate and Rhodes Scholar whose biography hints at danger, a man two decades older who becomes a role model for Charlie and the focus of sexual intrigue that entangles Georgia and Alice.
The novel follows the three graduates over the decade after they leave school, a span that finds them confronting mental and physical illness, career success and setbacks, the first blossoming of family life and the search for love. Though readers learn of the murder of Julie Patel, and of Rufus Storrow's suspect status, in the novel's prologue, Kirman is less interested in the whodunit element of her plot than she is in portraying how the crime alters the three students' view of themselves, of Storrow and of each other.
It takes some patience to navigate the first third of Bradstreet Gate, as Kirman is deliberate in introducing each of her characters and painstaking at providing the brushstrokes to fill out their portraits. But that patience is rewarded when we realize she has succeeded in creating dynamic characters free from the stereotypes that sometimes mar the efforts of first novelists. Kirman neatly manages the novelistic coincidences necessary to move her plot forward, while displaying little of the tendency toward authorial manipulation that's the hallmark of a less confident writer.
Robin Kirman's Bradstreet Gate is an assured first novel, one that showcases a promising talent with a command of all the tools necessary for delivering compelling stories in the future. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: Robin Kirman's first novel follows three Harvard students through their college careers and the 10 succeeding years, exploring how the aftermath of a classmate's murder shadows their lives.