A not strictly chronological but thoroughly entertaining entry in a franchise that shows no signs of running out of steam.
Vintage historical drama from seasoned veteran Gabaldon (An Echo in the Bone, 2009, etc.), another volume in her Lord John series.
Jamie Fraser, the star of the show, gets around, despite being confined to quarters—a nice estate in the Lake District, granted—for having chosen the wrong side during the Jacobite rebellion. Yet, proud Scotsman that he is, how could he have done otherwise? He’s the definition of dashing, though his spirits have been dashed at the death of his beloved wife. For their parts, Lord John and his brother Hal, loyal defenders of the crown, find they have need of Jamie when they set out to chase down a corrupt officer, “determined to bring Major Gerald Siverly to justice.” Siverly is a bad, bad man—think the Jason Isaacs character in the Mel Gibson movie The Patriot—who doesn’t think twice about killing his own men for his nefarious ends; if he had a handlebar mustache, he’d be twirling it. Meanwhile, the Greys, morally ambiguous chaps themselves, have deeper and darker reasons to want to put Siverly down. What more could you expect from a fop who heads an organization called the Society for the Appreciation of the English Beefsteak? A historical drama wouldn’t be worth its salt without a grail, and Gabaldon obliges with a not completely cooked through yarn about an ancient Gaelic poem, a hidden treasure (with clues tucked away, of course, in an abbey) and a romp through the wilds of Ireland and Scotland. Gabaldon’s formula is as reliable as an old Flash Gordon episode: There are the requisite villains, sneaky and dastardly, and good guys who are very good. But the author also has a nice, sometimes bawdy sense of humor—one of those villains earns the sobriquet “that wee arse-wipe,” and some of the adult interactions in the story are very adult indeed. A bonus for longtime fans of the series: Unlike some of the earlier books, where they have been known to wander offstage, Fraser and the Greys are on hand for most of the action.
A not strictly chronological but thoroughly entertaining entry in a franchise that shows no signs of running out of steam.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-385-33751-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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