Fresh, fast-moving historical fiction from a master storyteller.
A real 19th-century Bourbon infanta is the inspiration for this novel about a princess who writes a rebellious feminist memoir.
It begins with a rejection letter informing HRH Eulalia of Spain that though there may be “a great deal of truth in what [she says],” Ediciones Medina “will not, today nor ever, publish this book.” From there, Acevedo (The Distant Marvels, 2015, etc.) launches a wonderfully compact saga that weaves together real and invented characters and events. Around the same time infanta Eulalia was born, at least in Acevedo’s version, so was a boy named Tomás in the village of Burgos—and when his mother, Amalia, was chosen as the infanta’s wet nurse, he became Eulalia’s “milk brother.” Mother and son traveled to the Palacio Real, where for nearly two years they lived among the intrigues, infidelities, and indoor peacocks of the Spanish court. As much as Amalia misses her husband, the person she really pines for is her best friend, the midwife Gisela, but troubles similar to those that plague the palace are afoot at home, forever changing the relationships of all the key characters. In the next section of the book, we hear from Eulalia and Tomás, each telling one part of the story that brought them together again—she as the author of a scathing memoir, still trapped in her royal role; he as an unsuccessful bookseller asked by Su Alteza (her highness) to find her a publisher. From there the story finds its way to revolutionary Cuba and on to the Chicago Exposition of 1893, with a coda set in 1915. The dramatic changes of the period spanned by the book, which begins in a world which seems not far from medieval and ends among light bulbs, hotel rooms, and train stations, are subtly evoked, and its feminist themes are fitted elegantly into that frame.
Fresh, fast-moving historical fiction from a master storyteller.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60945-430-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
