An all-around fun read about a king and a cad.
Weir regales readers with the life of England’s King Henry VIII.
What a life to be king, answerable only to God! Full of hormones and high privilege, Prince Henry, barely into his teens, can hardly wait to feel the weight of the crown on his brow and to marry his late brother’s wife, Katherine of Aragon. But the “Church, for some unfathomable reason, had decreed that boys could not bed their wives until they were fourteen.” Such backward thinking. Finally, in 1509, the 17-year-old ascends to the throne and marries Katherine, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, so they can produce an heir. It’s a wonderful life at first. “He was doing his husbandly duty—and pleasure—nightly now, and soon, surely, Kate would be with child.” That turns out to be a sticky point, as Kate bears him eight children but no surviving son—her fault, of course. Then after 18 years, he ditches Kate for a series of other women such as Anne Boleyn. He is obsessed with siring a future king, believing it against the natural order of the world for a woman to rule (inferior beings, don't have the wits, etc.). There is much more of course, like his wish for a joint English-Spanish conquest of France. But there is a bigger issue with consequences through the centuries. England is a Catholic country in Henry’s day, and his insistence on annulling his marriage to Kate goes down poorly with the pope. That personal issue, as the world knows, leads to the establishment of the Church of England. Meanwhile, Henry (or Harry, as he is sometimes called) takes great pleasure in his adulterous dalliances, in eating and jousting, and in his exercise of power. And don't even think of defying him or plotting against him because you will die. Even predicting the king's death is deemed treason. Weir takes the abundant history and weaves imagined conversations and motivations into a delightful yarn. It's so much better to read about Henry VIII now than to have lived back then.
An all-around fun read about a king and a cad.Pub Date: May 30, 2023
ISBN: 9780593355060
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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