A delightfully sprawling comedy full of extended families, in all their cocooning warmth and suffocating expectations.
Calla Borelli inherited her love of the theater from her father, Sam, but directing only Shakespeare plays in 1949 might spell the end of her beloved Borelli theater.
Trigiani (All the Stars in the Heavens, 2015, etc.) uses the motifs of the Bard’s plays—orphans, star-crossed lovers, family feuds, and mistaken identities—and the Borelli theater stands at the center of all the action. She has crafted a world of warm, lively characters whose charming idiosyncrasies lead them to collide and ricochet along the way to love. Orphaned at 5, Nicky Castone was lovingly folded into his Aunt Jo and Uncle Dom’s family in South Philly. Now 28 and a WWII veteran, he works in the family cab business, which competes with his Uncle Mike’s business across town, since Dom and Mike have been feuding since 1933. When he’s not squiring Peachy DePino, his fiancee of seven years, he moonlights at the Borelli theater as a prompter and anything else Sam and Calla need. One fateful night, however, two leads of Twelfth Night are called away, leaving Nicky and Calla to take the stage for Sebastian and Olivia’s marriage scene, and chemistry ignites. Of course, Nicky and Calla don’t know they are in love yet. First, the course of love must be strewn with obstacles: Frank, Calla’s boyfriend, who wants to demolish the failing theater; Peachy, who objects to Nicky’s breaking off their engagement; Mr. DePino, who also objects and whose threats of violence inspire Nick to flee town. Nick volunteers to drive a telegram to Roseto, Pennsylvania, but instead of delivering the message, he decides to impersonate Ambassador Carlo Guardinfante of Roseta Valfortore, Italy, a decorated WWII veteran who can no longer attend the Roseto Jubilee given his sudden illness. Chaos ensues.
A delightfully sprawling comedy full of extended families, in all their cocooning warmth and suffocating expectations.Pub Date: June 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-231922-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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