Sprightly nonsense: True aficionados will despair, but fans of lighthearted mystery/romantic/historical fantasies may be...
A farcical, long-winded romp in which our heroine travels back in time to Jane Austen’s surprisingly raunchy England, where she may truly belong.
Actress and writer Elyot (The Memoirs of Helen of Troy, 2005) has played Austen on stage and uses the experience as the springboard for this bizarre homage to the English writer. Her heroine, “period geek” actress C.J. (Cassandra) Welles, has just auditioned for the part of her dreams, the role of Jane Austen in By a Lady, when she finds herself, still in costume, whisked back to early-19th-century Bath. But C.J. is penniless and soon arrested for stealing an apple. Released into the brutal care of Lady Wickham, she is quickly rescued again by Lady Dalrymple, who claims to recognize her as her niece. Cassandra, whose Georgian English seems faultless, joins the upper classes and falls for the impoverished but gentlemanly Earl of Darlington, a man who can not only claim Jane Austen as his cousin but also demonstrates skillful knowledge of the Kamasutra. Befriended by the writer and pleasured by the earl, Cassandra is a happy woman until Lady Dalrymple succumbs to a heart condition. Zipping back to the 21st century, Cassandra picks up some beta-blockers and soon her “aunt” is back in the pink. But Cassandra is pregnant and finds herself first jilted by the earl, then locked up in Bedlam, freed and subsequently killed in a riding incident. A dénouement in London supposedly explains aspects of the plot before wrapping up with a happy ending. Bending rules of sense as well as time, Elyot fools no one but appears to enjoy herself mightily, depicting Austen as a keen shopper and weaving tendrils of her characters and events into the lurching narrative.
Sprightly nonsense: True aficionados will despair, but fans of lighthearted mystery/romantic/historical fantasies may be amused.Pub Date: March 28, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-9799-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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