In this People magazine version of the Greek classic, Helen is too self-justifying to be trustworthy and not charming enough...
In her first historical novel, Elyot, an actress whose real name is Leslie Carroll, tells the story of the Trojan War, including its causes and its aftermath, from Helen’s viewpoint.
The daughter of Leda and Zeus, Helen never feels accepted by her stepfather, the Spartan king Tyndareus, especially after Leda’s suicide. While her jealous older sister Clytemnestra worships power, pretty Helen is a sensualist who secretly worships “The Great Mother” and ancient deities her mother told her about. When Clytemnestra marries and has a baby, she softens with newfound love until brutish, power-hungry Agamemnon, the novel’s villain, kills Clytemnestra’s first husband and child so he can consolidate his political control by marrying Clytemnestra himself. Meanwhile, Thesues, Prince of Athens, kidnaps 14-year-old Helen for a ransom. Despite a large age difference, she falls deeply in love with him before her brothers “rescue” her, unaware that she is pregnant with Theseus’s child. Helen secretly bears a daughter, Iphigenia, and gives her to Clytemnestra to raise as her own. Then Tyndareus marries her off to Agamemnon’s younger brother Menelaus thanks to some wheeling and dealing by wily Odysseus, who has his own objectives. Helen tries to be a good wife although she finds Menelaus hard to know and lacking in passion. While he occasionally shows flashes of statesmanship, he is usually a toady, jumping to his brother’s bidding. By the time Paris drops by Menelaus’s court, Agamemnon is already hungry for the rich trading outpost of Troy. When Helen deserts Menelaus and their children to run off with Paris, she gives him an excuse to put together an army and attack Troy. With the exception of saintly Hector, Helen’s take on the heroes and villains of the war are often at odds with Homer’s version. She depicts Achilles as a vicious rapist, for instance, and is less than warm toward the Trojan women.
In this People magazine version of the Greek classic, Helen is too self-justifying to be trustworthy and not charming enough to cause a war—or carry a novel.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2005
ISBN: 0-307-20998-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
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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