A solidly entertaining multigenerational saga about sacrifice, self-reliance, and what it means to be family.
When estranged siblings discover that their recently deceased grandmother left behind a multimillion-dollar diamond, they try to look past their differences in order to unearth the secrets of their grandmother’s past.
Beck Miller has a better relationship with her maternal grandmother, Helen, than do either her brother, Jake, who lives across the country, or her married sister, Ashley, who simply can’t be bothered. Their mother, Deborah, has also done precious little to care for her mother over the years, so it's no wonder that when Helen dies, she bequeaths her most valued possession, a bedazzled brooch, to Beck. Beck is shocked to discover that the brooch, which looks like costume jewelry, contains a real 137-karat diamond. Known as the Florentine Diamond, the gem once belonged to the Habsburgs and has been missing since the early 1900s. The stone is worth millions, and Beck feels compelled to share this windfall with her family members despite their dysfunctional relationships. As word spreads that the Millers are in possession of the famous Florentine, every possible claimant, from the FBI to the Italian government, makes efforts to confiscate it from them. The Millers begin investigating Helen’s youth in an effort to prove that she came by the stone honestly. As they uncover details of her childhood, including her narrow escape from the Nazis, the Millers also learn secrets about each other that threaten their already tenuous relationships. Told from the perspectives of all three Miller siblings as well as their mother, the story emphasizes the ways in which varied perceptions of identical facts can create rifts in relationships. The author portrays complex relationships with insight and finesse, if also with a degree of excessive detail. Although the novel has the unfortunate quality of shifting points of view too quickly, often making it feel disjointed, the questions with which the main characters grapple are sufficiently engrossing that readers will remain engaged. Replete with details about gemstones and the mechanisms for determining a diamond’s quality and provenence, the novel showcases how greed and selfishness can cause fissures in relationships that reverberate for generations.
A solidly entertaining multigenerational saga about sacrifice, self-reliance, and what it means to be family.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7783-0507-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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