A rousing good read, nevertheless, and a welcome addition to a quite considerable (and really rather underrated) body of...
The legend of Roderick the Beardless—the ninth-century hero who was in fact a heroine—is given fictional form in Holland’s lively and entertaining 23rd novel.
Protagonist Ragny, daughter of Spain’s Queen Ingunn, flees following her mother’s death from the heavy-breathing clutches of Ingunn’s oafish consort Markold the Grim. Donning male garb and adopting the name Roderick, Ragny and her companion-in-arms Seffrid (Markold’s former “sergeant”) journey to the neighboring kingdom of Francia (ruled by Charlemagne’s grandson, the “slipshod little King” Charles), and help defend it from marauding “Northmen.” Having proven “himself” a mighty warrior, Roderick is given the hand of the king’s unwilling daughter Alpaida—and the inevitable revelation of Ragny’s true identity sends her to prison and a sentence of trial by fire to determine whether she is—as the suggestible Charles fears—a shape-shifting witch. The story’s resolution, accomplished through the agency of what may indeed be supernatural means, fittingly crowns Ragny’s adventures, and ends—as any legend worth its salt must—with a hard-won restoration of order. Holland (An Ordinary Woman, 1999, etc.) is a real master of historical fiction. She writes crisp, swift sentences, offers intensely sensory visualizations (e.g., “The trail began to drop away under them, so that his horse leaned back and slid stiff-legged with each step on the hard rock”), constructs vivid action scenes, and judiciously mingles her characters’ introspective moments with the surrounding drama—stumbling only by employing King Charles reminiscences a bit too overtly as exposition, and with occasionally supercharged rhetoric (as when Ragny and Leovild, the courageous knight who wins her, meet in a climactic embrace: “Her mouth was like the rose, and he the bee”).
A rousing good read, nevertheless, and a welcome addition to a quite considerable (and really rather underrated) body of work.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-86890-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
Prime candidate for a TV movie.
A romance/investigation debut novel set firmly in the spiritual aftermath of WWI.
Maisie Dobbs, recently turned private investigator in 1929 England, had been a nurse back during the war to end all wars, so she knows about wounds—both those to the body and those to the soul. It’s just a month after she sets up shop that she gets her first interesting case: What initially looks like just another infidelity matter turns out to be a woman’s preoccupation with a dead man, Vincent Weathershaw, in a graveyard. Flashback to Maisie’s upbringing: her transition from servant class to the intellectual class when she shows interest in the works of Hume, Kierkegaard, and Jung. She doesn’t really get to explore her girlhood until she makes some roughshod friends in the all-woman ambulance corps that serves in France, and she of course falls for a soldier, Simon, who writes her letters but then disappears. Now, in 1929, Maisie’s investigation into Vincent Weathershaw leads her to the mysterious Retreat, run like a mix between a barracks and a monastery, where soldiers still traumatized by the war go to recover. Maisie knows that her curiosity just might get her into trouble—yet she trusts her instincts and sends an undercover assistant into the Retreat in the hopes of finding out more about Vincent. But what will happen, she worries, if one needs to retreat from the Retreat? Will she discover the mystery behind her client’s wife’s preoccupation with a man who spent time there? And by any chance, albeit slight, might she encounter that old lover who disappeared back in 1917 and who she worried might be dead? Winspear rarely attempts to elevate her prose past the common romance, and what might have been a journey through a strata of England between the wars is instead just simple, convenient and contrived.
Prime candidate for a TV movie.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-56947-330-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
BOOK TO SCREEN
As is often the question when reframing beloved fictional characters: Does it feel true? Readers will have to decide for...
An imagined life of Marilla Cuthbert, of Green Gables fame.
There’s a line from Anne of Green Gables that author McCoy says has always stayed with her: When Marilla points out their neighbor John Blythe (father of Anne's beloved Gilbert) and says “We used to be real good friends, he and I. People called him my beau," Anne cries, “Oh, Marilla—and what happened?" Fascinated by the question, McCoy answers it here with a rich, historically intense life for Marilla, beginning when she is 13; her mother is pregnant and her Aunt Izzy comes to help. The Cuthberts are quiet and retiring, so the arrival of Izzy—who fled Prince Edward Island to become a successful dressmaker in the city—gently pushes Marilla out of her isolation. Together they join a newly formed sewing circle in Avonlea, where Marilla meets her lifelong friend-to-be, Rachel, and through her meets John Blythe (though this is a bit of a stretch, because as a close longtime neighbor, wouldn’t Marilla already know him?). Their attraction is immediate, but on the day John expresses his interest toward her, her mother and the baby die in childbirth, casting a shadow of guilt and pain over the experience. Courting is put on hold as the family regroups and Marilla feels obligated to take care of her father and older brother, Matthew, but a charitable visit to an orphanage in nearby Hopetown brings long-simmering national tensions home to Marilla, leading to a new direction in her life and an argument with John she can’t seem to overcome. In fleshing out Marilla’s story, McCoy weaves in fascinating historical details of Canada’s religious and political tensions of the mid-19th century as well as the devastating legacy of slavery and an interesting contemplation of what might happen to survivors of the Underground Railroad once they hit Canada in the dangerous days before the American Civil War.
As is often the question when reframing beloved fictional characters: Does it feel true? Readers will have to decide for themselves, but fashioning Marilla as a flawed hero of her times is a lovely tribute.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-269771-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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