A delectable serving of Tudor dish.
Another “historical entertainment” from Erickson, in which the third wife of Henry VIII has her say.
Queen Jane Seymour has been the focus of few Tudor historical novels, compared with her more flamboyant predecessor Anne Boleyn. In all likelihood, perhaps because Jane was the only wife to give Henry what he wanted (a male heir) and to die before Henry could tire of her, Jane is generally seen as too nice to capture readers’ interest. Erickson debunks the lackluster truth by freely imagining some unhistorical escapades for the shy daughter of the politically astute Seymours. As maid of honor to Henry’s first Queen, Catherine of Aragon, Jane serves her mistress faithfully, all the while Catherine is being maligned, discredited and ousted by Henry, who declares himself the head of the Church in England mainly to nullify his marriage. Jane hates her father for seducing her fiancé Will’s sister, thereby alienating Will’s family and jeopardizing the engagement. Seymour senior also beds his son Ned’s wife Cat, causing Ned to banish Cat to a convent and disown his two sons, whom Jane takes under her protection. But Jane has her amoral, conniving side. She joins with Catherine’s other ladies in mercilessly baiting Anne Boleyn, a newcomer to Court. While still being courted by Will, she has an unapologetic affair with Galyon, a French glazier who is repairing Anne Boleyn’s windows. Informed by Ned of a poisoning attempt on Henry Fitzroy, King Henry’s illegitimate son by Anne’s sister Mary, Jane sanctimoniously tattles to the King, implicating both Anne and the now-exiled Catherine. After Anne has Galyon killed and Will announces plans to wed another, Jane resigns herself to spinsterhood but vows revenge against Anne, who has fallen into royal disfavor after the birth of Princess Elizabeth. Jane entices Henry by going with what she’s good at: appearing to be gentle, unassuming and, above all, trustworthy. But as Erickson amply demonstrates, there is no trust among Tudors.
A delectable serving of Tudor dish.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-59690-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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