Highly romanticized, oddly apolitical, and not very compelling.
Historical about the love affair between FDR and Lucy Mercer, from Lucy’s point of view.
Lucy, whose prominent Catholic family has fallen into genteel poverty, takes a job in 1914 as Eleanor Roosevelt’s social secretary. Franklin is Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and the Roosevelts are ensconced in happy if cramped domesticity in Washington. FDR’s ambitions lie just below the surface, while Eleanor’s politics have not yet taken shape—she doesn’t even support women’s suffrage. Lucy idolizes Eleanor, though, and Feldman (God Bless the Child, 1998, etc.), who also writes as Elizabeth Villars, sketches a charming and bittersweet picture of the two rather similar young women sitting on a carpet surrounded by envelopes, their loss of innocence is soon to come. Although a mutual attraction develops between Franklin and Lucy, nothing untoward happens at first. But war looms, Eleanor goes away with the children, and the sexual tension rises. Lucy increasingly describes Eleanor as a socially conscious but personally insensitive wife driving her husband away by not catering adequately to his needs. Finally, Lucy and Franklin consummate their love in a tawdry roadside motel, and he vows to leave Eleanor—who, when she finds a stash of Lucy’s love letters, offers Franklin his freedom. But he places ambition over love and stays put. Lucy shows not the slightest anger over this rejection, although she later views FDR’s polio as God’s punishment to them both. She marries a wealthy older man she professes to love and spends the next 20 years in the lap of luxury. Then, on the eve of WWII, when she brings her ailing husband to Washington for treatment, she and FDR pick up where they left off, more or less (sex is not mentioned), and he dies with Lucy by his side. In this retelling, Franklin comes across as surpassingly selfish, Eleanor as pathetic, and Lucy as annoyingly saintly.
Highly romanticized, oddly apolitical, and not very compelling.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-05153-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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