An intelligent prequel packed with enjoyable Austen references, hampered somewhat by underdeveloped characterization.
A Jane Austen pastiche involving a disgraced young lady, amateur theatricals, and matrimonial machinations.
Disliking her dull lessons, 16-year-old Susan Smithson is more pleased than saddened to be dismissed from school after allowing the music master to kiss her hand. As an orphan possessing a great deal of beauty but no fortune, Susan is dependent on the generosity of her uncle, George Collins, who’s redoubled his determination to make her “thoughtful, quiet and obedient.” At first, things go well: Susan manages to behave, meets some attractive gentlemen, and is given a new gown by a rich widow. The young woman even charms the formidable Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who’s now visiting London. But a further indiscretion with the rakish Mr. Oliver is the last straw, so Susan is sent to Hunsford to stay at the country parsonage of her tiresome uncle, the Rev. William Collins, and her Aunt Charlotte; at least her shy cousin and friend, Alicia, will be there. Lady Catherine is the clergyman’s patroness, and on returning to her country estate, she gives Susan further chances to ingratiate herself. Susan gets to know the local gentry and their set, including Frank Churchill (from Emma), the Johnson family, and their guest, the heiress Miss Richardson. After noticing that Alicia and young Henry Johnson share an attraction, Susan hits upon a scheme to bring them together: putting on a play. Using her skills at reading people and quietly manipulating them, she convinces Henry to hold amateur theatricals. Onstage and off, there’s much life-changing drama—including proposals, an elopement, and a death. Although its events take place sometime after Pride and Prejudice (and include some of that novel’s characters), McVeigh calls her debut a “Jane Austen Prequel” in that it tells the origin story of the title character in Austen’s unfinished work Lady Susan. By the time the latter novel opens, Lady Susan Vernon is a widow in her mid-30s, and although she’s beautiful and charming, she’s a cold, scheming, and shameless seductress. McVeigh introduces a much milder Susan, even if she is manipulative and self-involved. But it isn’t easy for readers to see how she’ll become the older version, as there’s little Austenian character development in these pages. Whatever Susan’s future, McVeigh portrays her as much the same person at the end of this novel as at its beginning—possibly because the young woman has no real obstacles to overcome or any foil to challenge her perceptions. This contrasts with how Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet is challenged to reconsider her judgments of Mr. Darcy, or how the timid Fanny Price must stand up for herself against Henry Crawford’s determined courtship in Mansfield Park. All Susan has to do is wait out her forced exile from London. Undeniably, though, McVeigh displays a brilliant, spot-on command of Austen’s diction and tone, as well as familiar phrases, as in the observation that “nothing is more fragile than a lady’s good name—for that, once lost, is lost forever.”
An intelligent prequel packed with enjoyable Austen references, hampered somewhat by underdeveloped characterization.Pub Date: June 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-916882-31-7
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Warleigh Hall Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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