Vivid, layered, and provocative period drama about the trade-offs of backing tradition versus letting go.
Twice longlisted for the Orange Prize for stories set in distant eras, Clark (The Great Stink, 2005; Savage Lands, 2010, etc.) takes on the dicey task of revitalizing Edwardian aristocrats grappling with the heir loss and social change ushered in by World War I.
The ancestral wick of Sir Aubry Melville and his wife— Eleanor to her extramarital companions—coils to ash with the death of their only son, Theo, killed in France before his Christmas letter arrives. Missing her golden boy, Eleanor consorts with spiritualists. “I’m not sure hush is what Eleanor’s after,” her mouthy youngest child, Jessica, snipes to a condolence caller. “She prefers the dead jabbering 19 to the dozen.” Ignored (as always) by their mother, and with presentation at court and weekend gaiety no longer an option—“Every man you might have married is already dead”—Theo’s teenage sisters, Phyllis and Jessica (call them Sense and Sensibility), plot their pacts with the new normal: the elder girl ducks her duty to reproduce by volunteering at a convalescent hospital, then pursues a degree in archaeology, leaving the younger trapped with their table-rocking mother and a father preoccupied by the future of Ellinghurst, the crumbling pile which by tradition must pass to males with the Melville surname. In doubt of ever being allowed to start her own life, 19-year-old Jessica bolts and cadges a job in London as the agony aunt columnist for a new women’s magazine. Clark reminds us that one of the pleasures of reading historical fiction is meeting characters whose thoughts are their own but also mirror the wrongdoings and legacies of their time. We commiserate with Jessica for having to jolly older men, only because they vastly outnumber the age-appropriate ones. She does her best to torment her mother’s godson, Oskar Grunewald, the most insightful of their childhood set. A math prodigy and hopeless stick-in-the-mud (by Jessica’s estimate, though not her sister’s), Oskar faces his own wartime challenge—his German heritage could scrub his chance of working with his scientific idol at Cambridge. Ironically, his loyalty to the Melvilles poses a greater threat to his career.
Vivid, layered, and provocative period drama about the trade-offs of backing tradition versus letting go.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-544-12999-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
A compulsively readable account of a little-known yet extraordinary historical figure—Lawhon’s best book to date.
A historical novel explores the intersection of love and war in the life of Australian-born World War II heroine Nancy Grace Augusta Wake.
Lawhon’s (I Was Anastasia, 2018, etc.) carefully researched, lively historical novels tend to be founded on a strategic chronological gambit, whether it’s the suspenseful countdown to the landing of the Hindenberg or the tale of a Romanov princess told backward and forward at once. In her fourth novel, she splits the story of the amazing Nancy Wake, woman of many aliases, into two interwoven strands, both told in first-person present. One begins on Feb. 29th, 1944, when Wake, code-named Hélène by the British Special Operations Executive, parachutes into Vichy-controlled France to aid the troops of the Resistance, working with comrades “Hubert” and “Denden”—two of many vividly drawn supporting characters. “I wake just before dawn with a full bladder and the uncomfortable realization that I am surrounded on all sides by two hundred sex-starved Frenchmen,” she says. The second strand starts eight years earlier in Paris, where Wake is launching a career as a freelance journalist, covering early stories of the Nazi rise and learning to drink with the hardcore journos, her purse-pooch Picon in her lap. Though she claims the dog “will be the great love of [her] life,” she is about to meet the hunky Marseille-based industrialist Henri Fiocca, whose dashing courtship involves French 75 cocktails, unexpected appearances, and a drawn-out seduction. As always when going into battle, even the ones with guns and grenades, Nancy says “I wear my favorite armor…red lipstick.” Both strands offer plenty of fireworks and heroism as they converge to explain all. The author begs forgiveness in an informative afterword for all the drinking and swearing. Hey! No apologies necessary!
A compulsively readable account of a little-known yet extraordinary historical figure—Lawhon’s best book to date.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54468-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Real events like the Vietnam draft and Stonewall uprising enter the characters' family history as well as a stunning plot...
The Owens sisters are back—not in their previous guise as elderly aunties casting spells in Hoffman’s occult romance Practical Magic (1995), but as fledgling witches in the New York City captured in Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids.
In that magical, mystical milieu, Franny and Bridget are joined by a new character: their foxy younger brother, Vincent, whose “unearthly” charm sends grown women in search of love potions. Heading into the summer of 1960, the three Owens siblings are ever more conscious of their family's quirkiness—and not just the incidents of levitation and gift for reading each other's thoughts while traipsing home to their parents' funky Manhattan town house. The instant Franny turns 17, they are all shipped off to spend the summer with their mother's aunt in Massachusetts. Isabelle Owens might enlist them for esoteric projects like making black soap or picking herbs to cure a neighbor's jealousy, but she at least offers respite from their fretful mother's strict rules against going shoeless, bringing home stray birds, wandering into Greenwich Village, or falling in love. In short order, the siblings meet a know-it-all Boston cousin, April, who brings them up to speed on the curse set in motion by their Salem-witch ancestor, Maria Owens. It spells certain death for males who attempt to woo an Owens woman. Naturally this knowledge does not deter the current generation from circumventing the rule—Bridget most passionately, Franny most rationally, and Vincent most recklessly (believing his gender may protect him). In time, the sisters ignore their mother's plea and move to Greenwich Village, setting up an apothecary, while their rock-star brother, who glimpsed his future in Isabelle’s nifty three-way mirror, breaks hearts like there's no tomorrow. No one's more confident or entertaining than Hoffman at putting across characters willing to tempt fate for true love.
Real events like the Vietnam draft and Stonewall uprising enter the characters' family history as well as a stunning plot twist—delivering everything fans of a much-loved book could hope for in a prequel.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3747-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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