Margaret’s alternating bursts of inspiration and despair about her work may feel achingly familiar to Dutton’s likely...
A slim, poetic meditation on the writing life as seen through the experiences of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, a 17th-century woman of letters.
In the Author’s Note, Dutton (Sprawl, 2010, etc.) thanks Virginia Woolf for introducing her to her subject: the Duchess of Newcastle appears in Woolf’s essay of that name as well as in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf’s famous plea for women’s economic and intellectual autonomy. Woolf hovers over this brief novel, audible in its cadences and visible in its cascading images of nature, artistry, and oddity. Margaret Lucas, a daughter of royalist gentry, is sent to sit out the English civil war as a lady-in-waiting to the English queen in Oxford: “I found myself in an unknown universe, whirling far into space: African servants, dogs in hats, platonic ideals, sparkling conversation, and ivy-covered quadrangles with womanizing captains, dueling earls, actors.” The war heats up and the queen's court moves to Paris. Back home, offstage, most of Margaret's family members die in the war. She wins the heart of William Cavendish, 30 years her senior. He’s a rich, intellectual marquess, quite the catch, but the Parliamentarians have confiscated his vast estates and fortune. The couple lives in exile in France and the Low Countries, where they hang out with scientists, poets, and philosophers (Descartes, Hobbes, Waller, Davenant), writing plays, poems, and treatises, until the Restoration reverses their fortunes (and for some reason the narration switches from first person to third). Back in England, now a duchess, Margaret gets weirder and weirder, all in carefully crafted, lyrical sentences. She offends the new queen by showing up to an audience in a dress with an extravagant train. When visitors come, she rants and recites at them. She wears a topless outfit to the theater, rouging her nipples. People follow her around, calling her Mad Madge. Most of all, though, she struggles to write. Despite its period setting and details, this novel—more poem than biography—feels rooted in the experiences of contemporary women with artistic and intellectual ambitions.
Margaret’s alternating bursts of inspiration and despair about her work may feel achingly familiar to Dutton’s likely readers, many of whom will probably also be aspiring writers.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-936787-35-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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