An engaging, elegantly narrated collection of tales that manages to make history feel personal.
In this collection of stories, an older King Edward I of England reminisces about the tragedies, loves, and battles that hardened him over the years.
The year is 1307, and the once formidable King Edward I is near death. He visits Marjory, the 11-year-old daughter of Scottish freedom fighter Robert the Bruce, in her cage at the Outer Court of Lanercost Priory in northern England. He has imprisoned her there as punishment for her father’s rebellion, but the two quickly form an odd sort of bond as he spends days regaling her with stories of his youth. Each of the collection’s 27 tales—beginning with the boyhood of the king’s father, Henry Plantagenet, in 1216 and concluding with a friend’s dire warning that Edward’s legacy is at stake if he continues pursuing the Scottish rebels—fills in pieces of the monarch’s personal and public life. From his deep love for Queen Eleanor to the brutal murder of his cousin Hal and Edward’s fatal flaw at the Battle of Lewes that resulted in a major setback in the bloody civil war led by Simon de Montfort, readers slowly discover what led to the king’s descent into cruelty—as well as Marjory’s eventual fate. Smith readily admits that her stories, while historically based, are largely fictional. This creative freedom results in a book that examines a dense swathe of history in an approachable way, sparking a mixture of both sympathy and repulsion for Edward. And even with the limited plot given to her in the frame story, the plucky Marjory manages to shine. While the prose can become dense in places, its vividness consistently brings history alive (“At night, the streets of London were extremely dangerous. Only rats, mongrels, and madmen dared to venture out alone”). The volume also includes helpful footnotes to explain unfamiliar terms. Smith ultimately presents a thoughtful examination of love, loyalty, and the legacies that mortals leave behind.
An engaging, elegantly narrated collection of tales that manages to make history feel personal.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9798324489366
Page Count: 562
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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