The history is consistently more surprising than the fiction in this grandly scaled epic of a turbulent period.
A veteran of Victorian intrigue (Execution Dock, 2009, etc.) trains her sights on the late 13th century, when the powerful of Rome and Byzantium were just as unscrupulous and prone to violence.
Anna Zarides’ brother Justinian has been pronounced guilty of murdering Bessarion Comnenos, who bitterly opposed the empire’s union with Rome. Anna comes to Constantinople hoping to find evidence that will vindicate her twin, now exiled to Judea, and she protects herself in the vast, strange city by assuming the disguise of a eunuch. As the physician Anastasius Zarides, she steadily builds a thriving practice, assisted in large part by the support of Bessarion’s magnetic, monstrous mother-in-law, Zoe Chrysaphes, whose “supreme skill” is poisoning her enemies by inventive means that anticipate Lucrezia Borgia. But for all her success in attracting patients and keeping her gender secret—even from Captain Giuliano Dandolo, the attractive Venetian aristocrat who soon wins her heart—Anna is agonizingly slow in working her way into the confidence of Bishop Constantine, Justinian’s patron, who hides a thousand secrets. History, meanwhile, is moving far more rapidly than Anna. A series of revolving-door popes seek a rapprochement between East and West that amounts to a subjection of the Orthodox Church even as Charles of Anjou, King of Naples and the Two Sicilies, works tirelessly to promote another crusade against Byzantium. Perry, who’s chosen her period (1273–82) with a canny eye for drama, makes this complex historical background both vivid and clear without any grandstanding (apart from an ill-judged walk-on by ten-year-old Dante Alighieri). She’s less successful in creating characters capable of embodying both the salient historical conflicts and the illusion of independent lives of their own; they always behave exactly as you’d expect.
The history is consistently more surprising than the fiction in this grandly scaled epic of a turbulent period.Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-345-50065-6
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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