A reflective, compassionate, and gracefully written tale about a designer that effectively uses its historical setting.
In this debut novel set in 1931, a corsetiere fleeing scandal starts over in a small town, where she learns more about her past and herself.
When Marion Hatley, 33, gets a letter urging a visit to her Aunt Elsie, who is dying, the invitation is well-timed. She’s just been let go from her seamstress job after a customer witnessed Marion embracing her sister’s husband, Benton Granger. Thirty miles from Pittsburgh is little Cooper’s Ford, where Marion—hoping rumors haven’t pursued her that far—will serve as a temporary schoolteacher and care for her failing aunt in the evenings. Meanwhile, Marion can work on perfecting her mother Vera’s vision of the ideal shaping garment, both flattering and comfortable: “a corset that did not so much constrict the flesh as gently remind it to behave.” Marion, a resourceful woman, soon settles into her new routine, becoming friendly with Elsie’s excellent daytime caregiver and housekeeper, Ina Lisle, and with Elder Baines (“Elder” being a first name, not signifying a church official), who was injured in World War I, still suffers from shell shock, and helps Walter, Ina’s son, with his reading. After Marion has a breakthrough with her new shapewear design, dubbed the Whisper Lift, she begins selling her work in a local shop. Marion learns essential truths about her mother (now dead) from Elsie and becomes a force for good in the lives of several people. In her novel, Castrodale draws readers in with the fascinating details of inventing and constructing Marion’s new foundation garment, a process that requires a union of engineering, creativity, and sympathy for the female body. Sympathy directed by action is a keynote of Marion’s character and plays out in the lives of several characters in significant ways. Though some elements, such as Marion’s affair with Benton or lingerie’s ooh-la-la associations, could be played for cheaper thrills, the book’s style is serious-minded and thoughtful, even lyrical: “Marion knew what it was to watch good work and be guided by it, even months and years later.”
A reflective, compassionate, and gracefully written tale about a designer that effectively uses its historical setting.Pub Date: April 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-940782-02-7
Page Count: 277
Publisher: Garland Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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