A sweeping novel, set in Shanghai and elsewhere, of the high life between the wars in which a rich young Englishwoman torn by loyalties to different cultures, and oppressed by a stifling marriage, finds true love at last. Aging Clio Oliver, McLeay's (Passage Home, 1990, etc.) latest protagonist, starts writing her life story on a visit to Shanghai, the city where she was born in 1910. It begins with her family's return to England in 1923. There to attend grandfather Matthew's funeral, Clio recalls seeing a woman and her young son stand apart from the Oliver family at the ceremony. The woman's presence seemed to disturb Clio's father and Uncle Kit, who have just inherited the Oliver shipping empire. Clio, soon sent to boarding school, misses ``the enchanted security'' of her Shanghai house and garden. She fondly recalls her unusual but surprisingly happy childhood there: the loving Chinese governess who brought her up after her mother died; her father's concubines; and the sensual dancing lessons given her by two young Russian exiles, Igor and Nina. Despite the family's immense wealth, English life seems drab, and, though Clio is soon caught up in the rituals of the upper class, she is never really happy. The young boy at the funeral turns out to be Stephen Morgan, whose mother, Catherine Oliver, had been ostracized by the family for marrying a sailor; Stephen is eventually, reluctantly, brought into the family business. Clio travels, parties, and makes a suitable but increasingly unsatisfying marriage. Then her marriage takes her briefly back to Shanghai, now under Japanese assault and much changed. But wherever she goes—Shanghai, the Scottish Highlands during the war years—Stephen, not only a brilliant businessman but a war hero, is somehow always there to rescue her from bombs and betrayals. One of those beguilingly detailed period novels too intelligent to be froth and too unpretentious to do more than tell an absorbing story with panache and conviction.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14271-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1996
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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