A pleasant enough diversion that takes itself more seriously than it probably should.
A feisty aristocrat seeks out her destiny at the end of the world.
In her debut novel, Hannah indulges a fascination with lighthouses and historical fiction to craft an imaginative fantasy that veers precariously between tasteful romance and bodice-ripper. “Someone once told me that every tower had a ghost, and every ghost had a story,” begins narrator Sara Stevenson, the fictionalized daughter of the famous Scottish lighthouse engineer Robert Stevenson. Newly pregnant, the scandalized girl has been exiled to Cape Wrath, the most northwesterly point in Great Britain, in the year 1814. Furious with her family, she mourns the loss of her suitor, Thomas Crichton, a sailor who mysteriously vanished on the day of their planned elopement. Her reluctant protector in this uneasy locale is the secretive light-keep William Campbell, a gentle but brusque man who Sara seems to be forever accusing of ill intentions, even as he keeps a secret of his own. The collision of these two characters is highly entertaining, but Hannah muddies the fish-out-of-water story with an incongruous mystery. Sara is intrigued when she receives in the post an unusual timepiece, delivered by an Oxford scholar who promised to return it to another woman, Sara Crichton, at the wish of her dying husband. This wrinkle makes all the time-traveling in Diana Gabaldon’s series seem absolutely straightforward by comparison, although Hannah manages to keep the mystery afloat right up until the story’s end. Along the way, though, the author often makes too obvious an attempt to formalize her language while indulging in lots of hand-wringing about love torn asunder. Yet readers may find themselves won over by Stevenson’s fundamental conflict. “Two different men from totally different worlds there could not be,” she says, “and, God help me, but my heart was overwhelmed with a want of both of them.”
A pleasant enough diversion that takes itself more seriously than it probably should.Pub Date: July 27, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-345-52054-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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