Seriously brilliant, seriously flawed, ambitious, and delicious.
D.H. Lawrence, Jackie Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover, Lionel Trilling, Lady Constance Chatterley, and a host of others meet in an inspired fusion of fact and fiction.
To appreciate the delights of MacLeod's masterful novel, which takes its title from the original title of Lady Chatterley's Lover, one must have the patience to let it emerge from some dubious decisions about where to begin and how to unfold. These miscalculations recede as the full measure of the book becomes clear, about halfway through its more than 600 pages; MacLeod's material might have provided another author with several novels, a few stories, and an essay or two. One plotline—"The Exile"—unfolds in Lawrence's time, exploring the "ever-expanding ‘club’ of the aggrieved" he created by modeling his characters on life. Another—"The Subversive"—tracks Jackie Kennedy in the run-up to the 1960 election. A fictional FBI agent photographs Jackie at the New York obscenity trial over Chatterley; he becomes entangled in Hoover's plot to take down JFK while she meets Lionel Trilling to discuss the book. A third plotline covers the British obscenity trial in 1960; this section includes some lively fourth-wall–breaking and manages to nearly morph into a page-turner. But how closely is it based on the transcripts? Again and again, one feels eager to know where fact meets fiction—did the novelist Barbara Wall really write this wonderful, long letter to the defense attorney?—but the author is not inclined to tell us. "I have included letters and documents that have been faithfully reproduced; other such items have been invented, condensed, added to or modified for clarity," she writes at the end of the book. If you want more, she continues, go back to the original sources. Call us lazy, but we might prefer more detailed notes. Nevertheless, there is much to enjoy here. At a time when sex is so often linked with exploitation and abuse, Lawrence's central equation between physical passion and profound emotional connection is moving and nearly exotic. MacLeod's interpretation of this gospel includes a lovely Lawrentian scene of sex in a library and a thought, attributed to Jackie Kennedy, about the power derived from sex: "the secret act of beholding the public, daily person—the lover, sanctioned or illicit—transformed in one's presence into a private, raw spirit."
Seriously brilliant, seriously flawed, ambitious, and delicious.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63557-610-8
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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