A sweeping but intimate story that highlights the author’s clear attention to detail.
Butterfield presents a historical novel set during the infrequently portrayed French Wars of Religion.
Readers learn about the era’s tense political situation through diary entries written by Marguerite, Princess of France, beginning in 1581. Her mother, Catherine de Medici, is in a rage, beating Marguerite for a perceived attempt to flirt with a man from what Catherine sees as an unsuitable family. This results in Marguerite grudgingly entering into an arranged marriage with Prince Henri of Navarre, a Huguenot, to bring religious peace to France, where Protestants and Catholics have been warring. She’s prepared to fulfill her familial obligation on behalf of France, and even finds herself enamored with the prince. However, after the queen of Navarre voices her expectation that Marguerite convert to Protestantism, and a violent anti-Huguenot uprising occurs in Paris, the impending nuptials become more complicated. Soon, the couple are separated by violence; Henri flees and Marguerite is detained in Paris as a political prisoner before she seeks refuge with Flemish nobility. Things are going well until she receives a letter from her brother Alençon informing her that their sibling, Charles, the king, sees her attempted peacekeeping as sympathy for the Huguenots—a traitorous act he considers worthy of death. Over the course of this novel, Butterfield employs a diarylike style from Marguerite’s perspective that makes for a brisk read, and Marguerite, despite her royal background, comes off as approachable and very human throughout; for example, late in the novel, she has a powerful experience that brings her a sense of fulfillment that she’d never encountered in her strictly proscribed life. The author, for the most part, sticks closely to the events of the historical timeline, but takes some creative liberties, as when she notes in an afterword that the idea that one key character “was Marguerite’s One Great Love is cause for speculation; and so, I did.”
A sweeping but intimate story that highlights the author’s clear attention to detail.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2024
ISBN: 9798350928013
Page Count: 316
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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