The one-dimensional portrait of Elizabeth as a none-too-bright harridan makes her an unsatisfying antagonist for vivacious...
Another historical entertainment from the prolific Erickson (The Tsarina’s Daughter, 2008, etc.).
This swift, spare account is told in the plangent voice of Mary Stuart (1542–87). She begins her diary at age 15 with her marriage to the French dauphin, soon to be King Francis II. Her sickly husband is never able to father the heir Mary needs to solidify her position at the French court, ruled over by ruthless Queen Mother Catherine de Medici. Catherine’s seer, Michel de Notredame, intones that despite her impeccable royal pedigree, Mary has been doomed from birth. After Francis dies, Mary leaves for Scotland to assume the throne she inherited from her father, James V. She’s accompanied by Jamie, Earl of Bothwell, a fierce, brawling Scotsman. Roman Catholic Mary is unable to quell the unrest fomented by fractious clan warlords and the Presbyterian movement led by John Knox. Matters aren’t helped by a disastrous marriage to her cousin Henry, Lord Darnley, who rapes her. The son of that union, the future James VI, will remain a stranger to his mother. After Mary and Bothwell conspire to have Henry killed, her cousin and rival, England’s Queen Elizabeth, takes advantage of her unpopularity in Scotland to have her placed under house arrest in London. Bothwell spirits Mary away to a Scottish isle where they marry in secret. Their (fictional) daughter is raised in Normandy by Mary’s French kin. The Queen of Scots inspires Pope Gregory and swashbuckling Italian admiral Don John to muster a fleet to invade England. This plan comes to naught, and rather than embrace safe obscurity in Normandy, Mary and Jamie seek to blackmail Queen Elizabeth. Such harebrained schemes inevitably render Nostradamus’ prediction self-fulfilling.
The one-dimensional portrait of Elizabeth as a none-too-bright harridan makes her an unsatisfying antagonist for vivacious Mary, but this is the only misstep in a fast-paced, lavishly detailed narrative.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-37973-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2009
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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