Nonetheless, an intriguing glimpse at the decadence, debauchery and prudery of Baroque-era Venice.
Violin virtuoso in Vivaldi’s all-girl orchestra observes the intrigue of early-18th-century Venice in Quick’s second novel (Northern Edge, 1990).
The Ospedale della Pietà is a convent/orphanage/school where the nobility of Venice deposit their illegitimate infants. Particularly talented and fortunate foundlings may become Figlie di coro, musicians or singers with the famed all-female choir of the Pietà. Child prodigy violinist Anna Maria is the latest protégée of Antonio Vivaldi, nicknamed the “Red Priest” for his hair color and fiery temperament. Like many figlie, “Annina” is ignorant about her birth parents, but Sister Laura, her kindly mentor, has instructed her to correspond with an imaginary mother to unburden her heart. Though a Maestro of this august institution, Vivaldi can’t suppress his mischievous streak. He encourages young Annina and her friends to sneak out of the cloister to slide on a frozen canal, attend the opera and crash a masked ball (honoring Vivaldi’s patron King Frederick of Denmark) where the girls witness a keyboard showdown between handsome Scarlatti (who knew he was a hottie?) and the “Dear Saxon,” Handel. At the ball, Annina meets the love of her life, Franz. On a rare school-approved outing to the island of Torcello, Annina helps best friend Marietta keep a date with a lover. When Marietta becomes pregnant, Annina schemes to help her, and in the process causes major problems for herself. Forty-one-year-old Annina relates the events, so her future is known, which diminishes the suspense. Since much of the action takes place during Vivaldi’s enforced sabbatical from the Pietà, he is (regrettably) sketchily rendered.
Nonetheless, an intriguing glimpse at the decadence, debauchery and prudery of Baroque-era Venice.Pub Date: July 2, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-089052-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
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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