A fascinating historical drama.
A witch hunter must come to terms with the repercussions of his actions in Fearns’ historical novel.
In 1545, Geneva city magistrate Henry Aubert—a deeply religious man who lost his entire family to the plague—is summoned by John Calvin and tasked with trying witches in a small community. On his way to the assignment, Henry encounters Louise de Peney; she is a pretty young woman and a former nun, now a healer. Henry is intrigued by her. He begins investigating witchcraft, and, via torture, he manages to get a confession from the husband of an accused woman, but injures him so badly he must send for Louise. Louise doesn’t think much of his interrogation methods; still, she believes he is a good man and tries to warn him off his quest (“How many witches can there be? It is a sorry business, and it will destroy you. There can be no happy ending to this, whatever the truth”). The plot thickens when several women in town are accused of participating in a satanic ritual and arrested. As Henry continues with his work, Louise challenges his worldview, arguing that the women he is accusing of witchcraft are no more guilty of heresy than he is. Henry cares for her, but has trouble agreeing. When Louise is inevitably accused of witchcraft, everything Henry believes is thrown into question. There is a compelling tension in Henry between his desire for sex and his piety that, in his eyes, casts any interest in women as sinful. But his absolutism is constantly challenged as he struggles to fulfill his mission and questions whether he should adhere to his faith or adjust based on what he has learned. Louise is a fascinating character, too; she’s smart and well read (better read than Henry). Louise understands what is happening better than Henry does—she knows the accused women are only guilty of being women. Henry is a bit naïve, and although that changes as the novel progresses, he also remains anchored in Calvinist thinking, leading to a tragic ending. The narrative provides a deep look into the fear of witchcraft, underscoring how gender and sex were at the heart of it.
A fascinating historical drama.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2023
ISBN: 978-1958228272
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Quill & Crow Publishing House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2023
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
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