A powerful imagination and sure grasp of modern developments in mathematics and physics are the chief distinguishing virtues of this superb second novel by the British author of Blood Sisters (not reviewed). The protagonist is Lieserl, the illegitimate daughter born in 1902 to Albert Einstein and Mileva Maric, then immediately given up for adoption lest the “screaming” infant disrupt her father’s scientific studies. Nothing is known of the historical Lieserl, but in McGrail’s imagining she grows up (in a Hungarian village with her adoptive “mother”) painfully aware of her rejection, fascinated by what she can glean of her father’s researches and theories, and determined to “haunt” him by becoming a superior theoretical scientist herself (“I’d beat him to an explanation of the universe if it killed me”). The novel recounts in exemplary detail her removal to Vienna (with her tutor and eventual lifelong companion) in 1913, marriage (to a Jewish importer), motherhood, success as a physicist, complicity with the Third Reich (persuaded she must help “smash the Jewish relativity theory . . . and advance the cause of Aryan physics”)—and, after being separated by WWII from her loved ones, her passage to America and participation in the Manhattan Project. This crowded story climaxes with a coruscating primal scene: Lieserl’s first meeting with her father, on his deathbed—a meeting that is, simultaneously, accusation, reconciliation, and purgation. To McGrail’s great credit, the long aftermath of Lieserl’s odyssey—and her accommodation to the vengeful motives that have sustained her—is no less absorbingly dramatic than all that has preceded it. McGrail’s formidably intelligent novel presents with perfect clarity intimidating scientific matter and offers unusually thought-provoking ideas about the energies liberated by women’s—or at least this woman’s—resentment of male myopia and condescension. A fascinating complement to Denise Giardina’s fictional portrayal of German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Saints and Villains, p. 10).
Pub Date: July 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-393-04611-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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