A satisfying saga of the late Habsburg period.
Second and final installment of Pataki’s sympathetic fictional biography of Austro-Hungarian Empress Sisi.
When we last left Sisi, in the first volume, she was rebelling against the strictures of her life at the Viennese court as the consort of Emperor Franz Joseph. In particular, she was defying her mother-in-law, Archduchess Sophie, who had not only exacerbated Sisi’s estrangement from Franz, but appropriated the upbringing of her three children. Sisi embarks on a lifelong strategy for escaping the pressures of noblesse oblige: traveling. After going to Corfu to recuperate from a depression, she heads for the family estate in Hungary, where she can spend time horseback riding and enjoying the attentions of Count Andrássy, the former rebel who helped consolidate the two kingdoms. She gives birth to Valerie, the only child who will be raised free of Sophie’s interference, rumored by many to be Andrássy’s child. Too soon, however, duty calls and Sisi must return to court. After rescuing her son, Crown Prince Rudolf, from an abusive tutor, Sisi learns, as Sophie is on her deathbed, that the dragon lady meant well all the while. After enduring an interminable summer hosting other royals at the 1873 Viennese World Fair, Sisi is invited to England by the Earl of Spencer (ancestor of Princess Diana) to hone her fox hunting skills. While galloping over hill and dale she falls in love again, this time with dashing sportsman Bay Middleton, her only equal in horsemanship. Along the way we meet her deranged cousin King Ludwig of Bavaria, who bankrupts his kingdom building surreal castles and supporting his great love, Richard Wagner. Since this is a historical novel that strives for fidelity to the facts, Pataki draws a veil of privacy over Sisi’s rumored, but never definitively proven, infidelities. On the other hand, no such reticence downplays Franz’s rigidity or Prince Rudolf’s self-destructiveness.
A satisfying saga of the late Habsburg period.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8905-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
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