An intricate tour de force that conjures a new vision of the Bard’s early days.
A fictional imagining of William Shakespeare’s lost years, complete with espionage, barbed wit, and an unexpected relationship with Christopher Marlowe.
Novelist and playwright Blixt turns his attention to an extravagant and bawdy tale of the future Bard of Avon’s young misadventures before taking to quill and ink. The story begins with a teacher by the name of William Falstaff—actually Shakespeare, under an assumed name—who finds himself aiding and abetting the small-town antics of an alluring stranger named Kit, who’s none other than Christopher Marlowe, and their escapades grow to encompass foiling a plot against the life and throne of Queen Elizabeth. Drawing upon meticulously executed and seamlessly laid out historical research, Blixt gives shape to the Babington Plot of 1586, complete with all the expected real-life figures and a few of the author’s own creation. Surrounded by secrecy, betrayal, and political intrigue, the duo maintains a sense of levity and rakish delight in their undertakings, further buoyed by the budding romantic relationship that the author insinuates between them. Blixt deepens this latter plotline perhaps too soon, and he seems to lose its thread among the many convoluted turnings of the main story—sacrificing a closer character and relationship study for the sake of suspense and thrills. Will and Kit together traverse reputedly unsavory aspects of London society, finding in them much more humanity and grace than they expected; they navigate, also, the acuity of the group of 16th-century playwrights and writers called the Wits, of which Kit is a member along with John Lyly, Robert Greene, George Peele, and others. Breaking up all the insult-hurling, cipher-breaking, and law-evading are impassioned and eloquent discussions of the English canon, the future of the theater, and other intriguing questions. Overall, it makes for a delightful tour of British literary history, and Shakespeare lovers will delight in this imaginative and immersive work.
An intricate tour de force that conjures a new vision of the Bard’s early days.Pub Date: July 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-4-86751-441-2
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Next Chapter
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2022
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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