An entertaining, thoughtful story of old-fashioned romance complicated by dawning modern mores.
A teenage girl in 19th-century Denmark navigates first love and widening life prospects in this rich historical novel based on the life of artist and ethnographer Emilie Demant Hatt.
In the summer of 1887 in the village of Selde, 14-year-old Emilie—“Nik” to her family—is delighted when Carl Nielsen, a 22-year-old musician and budding composer, arrives for an extended stay, along with Nik’s rich Aunt Marie, his benefactress. Carl is talented, charming, and soulful, and the two are soon inseparable—until Nik’s prettier older sister, Maj, returns from teachers’ college. She starts monopolizing Carl’s time with piano duets while also vacillating over Frederik Brandt, an army officer who’s courting her. Sjoholm weaves these romantic entanglements with subtlety and sensitivity and sets them against the growing suffragist movement; Maj’s desire for a career and Nik’s artistic and scientific interests sit uneasily alongside their expected roles as wives and mothers. The novel’s second half takes Nik, Maj, and Carl to Copenhagen, where these conflicts only intensify. Nik and Carl secretly agree to marry once his musical career takes off, but Nik is put off by his incessant pawing and evidence that he’s an unreliable cad. Meanwhile, Maj gravitates further to the women’s rights movement, spurred by a deep relationship with feminist Eva. Throughout, the sisters brave a sexist world that imposes exasperating constraints—Nik can’t respectably walk city streets without a chaperone, for example—while offering new glimmers of freedom and self-fulfillment. Sjoholm (The Palace of the Snow Queen, 2007, etc.) fictionalizes the real-life stories of Hatt and Nielsen (who later became Denmark’s greatest composer) by joining time-honored marriage plots with a socially acute novel of ideas. There’s plenty of Jane Austen–like drollery here—“Oh, to be loved by a young man who has an opinion about sculpture,” trills one character—but also earnest engagement with contemporary intellectual debates on everything from Darwinism to free love. The latter can lead to some stilted dialogue: “The message of Nietzsche, correct me if I’m wrong, is that there’s room at the top for only a few, and those few are not women.” Still, Sjoholm gives readers vibrant characters whose personal travails are all the more engrossing for the cultural upheavals that energize them.
An entertaining, thoughtful story of old-fashioned romance complicated by dawning modern mores.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9883567-4-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: Cedar Street Editions
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Unrelenting gloom relieved only occasionally by wrenching trauma; somehow, though, Hannah’s storytelling chops keep the...
Hannah’s sequel to Firefly Lane (2008) demonstrates that those who ignore family history are often condemned to repeat it.
When we last left Kate and Tully, the best friends portrayed in Firefly Lane, the friendship was on rocky ground. Now Kate has died of cancer, and Tully, whose once-stellar TV talk show career is in free fall, is wracked with guilt over her failure to be there for Kate until her very last days. Kate’s death has cemented the distrust between her husband, Johnny, and daughter Marah, who expresses her grief by cutting herself and dropping out of college to hang out with goth poet Paxton. Told mostly in flashbacks by Tully, Johnny, Marah and Tully’s long-estranged mother, Dorothy, aka Cloud, the story piles up disasters like the derailment of a high-speed train. Increasingly addicted to prescription sedatives and alcohol, Tully crashes her car and now hovers near death, attended by Kate’s spirit, as the other characters gather to see what their shortsightedness has wrought. We learn that Tully had tried to parent Marah after her father no longer could. Her hard-drinking decline was triggered by Johnny’s anger at her for keeping Marah and Paxton’s liaison secret. Johnny realizes that he only exacerbated Marah’s depression by uprooting the family from their Seattle home. Unexpectedly, Cloud, who rebuffed Tully’s every attempt to reconcile, also appears at her daughter’s bedside. Sixty-nine years old and finally sober, Cloud details for the first time the abusive childhood, complete with commitments to mental hospitals and electroshock treatments, that led to her life as a junkie lowlife and punching bag for trailer-trash men. Although powerful, Cloud’s largely peripheral story deflects focus away from the main conflict, as if Hannah was loath to tackle the intractable thicket in which she mired her main characters.
Unrelenting gloom relieved only occasionally by wrenching trauma; somehow, though, Hannah’s storytelling chops keep the pages turning even as readers begin to resent being drawn into this masochistic morass.Pub Date: April 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-57721-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
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