An amuse-bouche filled with secret ingredients, covert liaisons, and hidden compartments.
In 1936, young Ondine Belange’s parents give her a mission: deliver lunch daily from their Café Paradis to a reclusive man renting a nearby villa. They swear her to silence, for the patron’s name is Pablo Picasso.
Picasso has fled Paris, his wife, and mistress for the picturesque countryside of Juan-les-Pins. Ondine soon finds herself swept up in the artist’s adventures, meeting Matisse and Cocteau; witnessing jealous fights between Picasso’s mistresses; posing for a series of portraits; and even taking him briefly as her lover. He sees her as an artist in her own right—a culinary artist. Yet Picasso disappears just as suddenly as he appeared, leaving Ondine more passionately awakened to the possibilities of her own life. Her parents have unfortunately arranged a marriage that will secure their business but personally disappoints her. Luckily, Ondine’s long-lost true love, Luc, returns in the nick of time to sweep her out of France. They land in New York, opening their own successful restaurant and raising their daughter, Julie. Years later, Julie gives her own daughter, Céline, Ondine’s notebook of recipes, a letter written the day of Céline’s birth, and clues suggesting that Picasso left Ondine more than memories—perhaps a painting was hidden among Ondine’s effects! A little sluggish at first, with chapters told from a wide-eyed young Ondine’s perspective, Aubray’s story picks up the pace and ratchets up the tension when Céline’s dastardly stepfather and twin half siblings enter the picture. Determined to cut Céline off from any inheritance, they machinate devious obstacles to keep her from her mother, setting in motion a quest for the missing Picasso worthy of Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. As with any good quest, the heroine finds love along the way, too.
An amuse-bouche filled with secret ingredients, covert liaisons, and hidden compartments.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-17765-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Urgent moral questions underlie a captivating mystery.
Sequestered at a boarding school during World War II, a rebellious teenager confronts secrets, lies, and danger.
Published in Hungary in 1970, and translated into English for the first time by Rix, this intricately plotted novel by Prix Femina Étranger winner Szabó (1917-2007) (Katalin Street, 2017, etc.) complicates a predictable coming-of-age tale by setting it in perilous times: War rages, patriotism incites bitterness and bigotry, and a clandestine resistance movement stealthily arises. When 14-year-old Gina is sent suddenly from her home in Budapest to an elite religious school in the provinces, she feels deeply bereft: of her beloved governess, who was forced to return to her native France; of her aunt’s delightful tea dances; of encounters with a handsome lieutenant with whom she is infatuated; and, most of all, of her father, whom she loves so deeply that she “felt the world complete only when they were together.” Protected, indulged, and self-absorbed, Gina suffers protracted (and somewhat irritating) adolescent angst. She hates the academy: Once a medieval monastery, it looms like a fortress; girls, dressed in black uniforms, their hair braided unfashionably, are forbidden to bring jewelry, scented soaps, or even toothbrushes from home. Obedience to Christian precepts and school authority is strictly enforced—and, by Gina, repeatedly flouted. She breaks rules, antagonizes her teachers and classmates, and mocks rituals and traditions, including the girls’ veneration of a statue they call Abigail, which has the uncanny power to know everything that happens at the school and offer warnings and sage advice. “All my life I have been a wild thing,” Gina reflects. “I am impatient and impulsive, and I have never learned to love people who annoy me or try to hurt me.” But when her father, visiting unexpectedly, reveals the reason he had to send her away, she vows to behave and realizes that Abigail is watching over her. Far from a supernatural being, Abigail’s real identity, Gina believes, is “someone inside these fortress walls who lives a secret life.”
Urgent moral questions underlie a captivating mystery.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68137-403-1
Page Count: 360
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
Flannery O’Connor fans will be drawn to this fictionalized version of her later years as a strong-willed, deeply lonely genius.
In the early 1960s, when wealthy New Yorker Melvin Whiteson moves to Milledgeville to marry his sweetheart Cookie Himmel, Flannery is living with her mother on the family farm, struggling to complete her second novel and suffering increasingly from the lupus that eventually kills her. A lifelong poultry aficionado, Flannery is also raising peacocks. In the novel’s striking first scene, Cookie and Melvin are awakened on the eve of their wedding by the peacocks’ din, a foreshadowing of what’s to happen to the couple. They love each other but do not understand each other. Emotionally fragile Cookie has considered Flannery her nemesis ever since she read Wise Blood and felt exposed in the worst light as the character Sabbath Lily. A cutting remark Flannery made at Cookie’s high-school awards ceremony so humiliated the girl that she left town as soon as she graduated. Sporting her new rich and handsome husband, Cookie has returned desperate to prove to Milledgeville what a glamorous success she has become and throws herself into community activities. Sophisticated but aimless Melvin finds himself at loose ends in the small town. Soon he finds himself drawn to Flannery in a platonic but intense relationship he hides from Cookie. When Cookie has a baby, she and Melvin begin to re-establish their connection, but ultimately Melvin cannot stay away from Flannery. Meanwhile, Cookie has hired the deputy sheriff’s wife Lona Waters, another lonely outsider, to make curtains for their new impressive home. Inevitably these unhappy lives—Lona has begun a dangerous relationship of her own—wind together until violent, senseless deaths occur, propelling characters into dark nights of the soul but also the possibility of Flannery O’Connor–like grace. The tone and careful use of language certainly recalls O’Connor, but Napolitano (Within Arm’s Reach, 2004) takes too many shortcuts around her plot and characters to bring the novel to life.
Pub Date: July 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59420-292-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
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