Three ambitious freshmen enter Harvard in the fall of 1993. By the time they graduate four years later, their lives have been forever changed by a classmate's murder 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. Each has had to overcome some form of serious family dysfunction to make it to Cambridge. Their futures, however, are altered irrevocably by their relationship with housemaster Rufus Storrow, a man two decades older who becomes a role model for Charlie and the focus of sexual intrigue that entangles Georgia and Alice.
Bradstreet Gate 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 Julie Patel's murder, 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.
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