SOURCE: Levi, Jonathan. “Beauty and the Beast.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (3 October 1999): 2.

In the following review, Levi compliments A Star Called Henry but argues that the novel is predictable and less edgy than Doyle's earlier work.

We know their dream; enough To know they dreamed and are dead; And what if excess of love Bewildered them till they died? I write it out in verse— MacDonagh and MacBride And Connolly and Pearse Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn, Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. 

—William Butler Yeats, “Easter 1916”

The details, even the fuzzy outlines of Dublin on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, may be as sketchy as dreams in the minds of most Americans. So what gives precision to history? How are we to remember an Easter 83 years distant? Is it enough to know, as Yeats did, that “they dreamed and are...