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KINGSTON BY STARLIGHT

Name: KINGSTON BY STARLIGHT
Author: Christopher John Farley
ISBN: 1-4000-8245-5

by Christopher John Farley ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2005

Ineffably, incoherently, inexplicably inane.

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Legendary lady pirate Anne Bonny improbably becomes a feminist heroine in this florid reimagining of her life and crimes, courtesy of Time magazine senior editor Farley (My Favorite War, 1996).

The story begins in County Cork around the turn of the 18th century, where Anne, privileged only child of a prosperous landowner, asserts her independence in sporting competition with other children, unaware that her family’s fortunes are imperiled. Her father’s gambling debts send him to America, and Anne and her “Ma” in later pursuit of him aboard a ship carrying slaves (and dangers), whereupon Anne ends up essentially orphaned and alone in South Carolina, thence—spurred by a conveniently acquired love of seafaring—to the Bahamas, where she dresses as a man and auditions, as it were, for a freebooter’s career. “I am of a sufficient height and with broad enough shoulders, that my secret was never guessed,” she confides, relating her exploits from the perspective of old age. Tavern-hopping, she meets Erroll Flynn–like pirate Calico Jack Rackam, joins his dastardly crew aboard the William, and embarks on the adventure she feels born for (“I never felt my womanhood so intensely as when I became a man of the sea”). Astonishments proliferate, as the William savages Spanish galleons, earning vast riches and the notoriety that brings its “men” to the gallows—saving Anne and a captured seaman, Read (also possessed of a remarkable secret). Well, why not? Our Heroine is a paragon of ethnic and gender sensitivity whose adaptation to the piratical “lifestyle” (her word) is eased by her matchless daring, eloquent familiarity with Shakespeare and the classics, and supremacy at chess (the latter skill impresses Calico Jack and leads to his happy discovery of her more purely biological attributes). Absurdity rules the waves, justice is served and bonny Anne lives on to tell thee.

Ineffably, incoherently, inexplicably inane.

Pub Date: July 1, 2005

ISBN: 1-4000-8245-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

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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.