Clark has talent and energy to burn. But she’s burning both up in wasteful displays of gratuitous pyrotechnics.
A seduced and abandoned maiden’s tribulations in early 18th-century London are recounted with almost frightening gusto in the British author’s successor to her debut historical novel, The Great Stink (2005).
When teenaged Eliza Tally is rejected by the well-born lover who impregnated her, then “married” her only nominally, Eliza’s pragmatic mother sends her away to become maid to London apothecary Grayson Black, whose truculent wife manages the household and savagely mistreats Eliza and her “half-witted” companion servant Mary. Eliza’s pregnancy is also endangered by the unwelcome attentions of Black’s oafish apprentice Edgar Pettigrew—and by her increasing suspicions that scientific researches undertaken by the secretive Black are disturbingly related to his interest in her services. The narrative of Eliza’s experiences and discoveries is juxtaposed with Black’s research notes and correspondence, from which we learn that he is studying “effects of strong emotions, fear, desire, and such like, upon the physical form of a foetus”; furthermore, using pregnant females as laboratory animals, to learn what “monsters” they may produce. The roots of Black’s obsession lie in the circumstances of his own birth: a story Clark (unwisely) declines to tell. Instead, she concocts a raving melodrama (precisely and impressively researched, but almost insanely lurid). It’s a compound of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, in which too many characters are drooling or malformed grotesques and virtually every scene is a festering sewer (the spectacle of St. Paul’s Cathedral being a hopeful exception), with numerous incidents plunging into stomach-churning visceral and excretory detail. Eliza perseveres, thanks to an initially benign bookseller, thwarted by the malevolent Ms. Black, ennobled by her protective affection for the pathetic Mary (whose own history holds secrets eventually disclosed). And all falls apart, in a climax so absurd it would seem excessive in the lamest of bodice-rippers.
Clark has talent and energy to burn. But she’s burning both up in wasteful displays of gratuitous pyrotechnics.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-15-101206-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
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 tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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