Still, Pataki deserves kudos for choosing her subject matter well—Sisi’s life is ideal fictional fodder.
A love match alters the course of the Habsburg dynasty in Pataki’s second novel (The Traitor's Wife, 2014).
In 1853, Elisabeth, known as “Sisi,” daughter of a Bavarian duke, accompanies her mother and older sister, Helene, to Vienna. The sisters’ redoubtable aunt, Archduchess Sophie, has arranged Helene’s betrothal to her son, Emperor Franz Joseph, who reigns over Austria, Germany, Hungary and most of central Europe. To Sophie’s alarm, Franz prefers the pretty, vivacious and athletic 15-year old Sisi to the shy, homely and studious Helene. After a gift-strewn engagement and lavish royal wedding, Sisi adjusts to the realities of wedded bliss among the monarchy: She has no privacy—every intimate detail’s observed and remarked upon by court spies—and a mother-in-law who's not about to brook any rivals for her son’s affection. When Sisi gives birth to two daughters, Sophie and Gisela, the archduchess complains of the lack of a male heir but happily appropriates the princesses, barring Sisi from any involvement in their upbringing. (The same will happen with Sisi’s ill-fated son, Prince Rudolf). Franz is preoccupied with affairs of state, dealing with rebellious upstarts like Hungary, Italy and Prussia, vassal nations eager to throw off the Habsburg yoke. Sisi is instrumental in healing the rift with Hungary, in part because this wildly popular empress has a special affection for the Hungarian people and landscape. On her first visit, she's captivated by the former rebel leader, dark, handsome Count Andrássy. However, young Sophie succumbs to a fever while in Budapest, feeding the archduchess’s propaganda campaign against Sisi’s maternal suitability. On her return to stultifying court life, Sisi is felled by depression but finally musters the will to stage a rebellion of her own. The plot doesn't stray far from the conventions of novels about royalty, exposing all the unsurprising human disappointments lurking behind the gilded façade.
Still, Pataki deserves kudos for choosing her subject matter well—Sisi’s life is ideal fictional fodder.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9022-0
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
While Liv’s more pedestrian story is less romantic than Sophie’s and far less nuanced, Moyes is a born storyteller who makes...
The newest novel by Moyes (Me Before You, 2012, etc.) shares its title with a fictional painting that serves as catalyst in linking two love stories, one set in occupied France during World War I, the other in 21st-century London.
In a French village in 1916, Sophie is helping the family while her husband, Édouard, an artist who studied with Matisse, is off fighting. Sophie’s pluck in standing up to the new German kommandant in the village draws his interest. An art lover, he also notices Édouard's portrait of Sophie, which captures her essence (and the kommandant's adoration). Arranging to dine regularly at Sophie’s inn with his men, he begins a cat-and-mouse courtship. She resists. But learning that Édouard is being held in a particularly harsh “reprisal” camp, she must decide what she will sacrifice for Édouard’s freedom. The rich portrayals of Sophie, her family and neighbors hauntingly capture wartime’s gray morality. Cut to 2006 and a different moral puzzle. Thirty-two-year-old widow Liv has been struggling financially and emotionally since her husband David’s sudden death. She meets Paul in a bar after her purse is stolen. The divorced father is the first man she’s been drawn to since she was widowed. They spend a glorious night together, but after noticing Édouard's portrait of Sophie on Liv’s wall, he rushes away with no explanation. In fact, Paul is as smitten as Liv, but his career is finding and returning stolen art to the rightful owners. Usually the artwork was confiscated by Germans during World War II, not WWI, but Édouard's descendants recently hired him to find this very painting. Liv is not about to part with it; David bought it on their honeymoon because the portrait reminded him of Liv. In love, Liv and Paul soon find themselves on opposite sides of a legal battle.
While Liv’s more pedestrian story is less romantic than Sophie’s and far less nuanced, Moyes is a born storyteller who makes it impossible not to care about her heroines.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-670-02661-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.
A novel of sharply drawn character studies immersed in more than 250 hard, transformative years in the African-American diaspora.
Gyasi’s debut novel opens in the mid-1700s in what is now Ghana, as tribal rivalries are exploited by British and Dutch colonists and slave traders. The daughter of one tribal leader marries a British man for financial expediency, then learns that the “castle” he governs is a holding dungeon for slaves. (When she asks what’s held there, she’s told “cargo.”) The narrative soon alternates chapters between the Ghanans and their American descendants up through the present day. On either side of the Atlantic, the tale is often one of racism, degradation, and loss: a slave on an Alabama plantation is whipped “until the blood on the ground is high enough to bathe a baby”; a freedman in Baltimore fears being sent back South with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act; a Ghanan woman is driven mad from the abuse of a missionary and her husband’s injury in a tribal war; a woman in Harlem is increasingly distanced from (and then humiliated by) her husband, who passes as white. Gyasi is a deeply empathetic writer, and each of the novel’s 14 chapters is a savvy character portrait that reveals the impact of racism from multiple perspectives. It lacks the sweep that its premise implies, though: while the characters share a bloodline, and a gold-flecked stone appears throughout the book as a symbolic connector, the novel is more a well-made linked story collection than a complex epic. Yet Gyasi plainly has the talent to pull that off: “I will be my own nation,” one woman tells a British suitor early on, and the author understands both the necessity of that defiance and how hard it is to follow through on it.
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-94713-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
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