A dark but entertaining novel for Shakespeare diehards and casual fans alike.
In Batchelder’s novel, William Shakespeare fakes his death and settles in Jamestown among hostile neighbors and a night-prowling beast.
Bored with retired, domestic life in Stratford, William Shakespeare decides to fake his own death and set out for the New World under a new name. Accompanying the newly minted William Kemp is his Black illegitimate son, Xander, who was entrusted to William’s care by his dying mother. While at sea, William befriends Margaret, a man living as a woman. The unlikely trio move into a house on the outskirts of Jamestown; they discover the house was left vacant after the previous owners were killed by a mysterious beast. The locals prove to be unfriendly, prejudiced against Margaret and Xander, and unwilling to help hunt down the mysterious creature, even as it claims more victims. Left to his own devices, William finds that he’s willing to go to any lengths to protect his newfound family. Lovers of Shakespeare and his contemporaries will find plenty of Easter eggs sprinkled throughout the story (readers are given about half the book to piece together clues about Will Kemp’s original identity before the name Shakespeare is thrown out haphazardly in a flashback scene). What seems like a setup for a rollicking adventure is ultimately revealed to be a melancholy rumination on family, society, outcasts, and the things worth valuing in life. Glimpses of Shakespeare’s trademark wit, along with a satisfying ending, keep the story from getting too grim. Any fictional depiction of Shakespeare faces the challenge of living up to the original’s facility with words. This story succeeds at the task without trying too hard to be clever: “‘I have a magnificent beast. But you have not, and a searching party can only travel at the speed of its slowest member.’ ‘Marry, sir, I know not which is worse, that you do think me slow, or worse, a ‘member.’’”
A dark but entertaining novel for Shakespeare diehards and casual fans alike.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 9781637898277
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Macabre Ink
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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