Playing with ideas about creativity, exploring Victorian gender roles and women’s rights, Souhami’s first novel is a...
Rearranging the characters in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, acclaimed British biographer Souhami (Murder at Wrotham Hill, 2012, etc.) audaciously puts a modern spin on a literary classic.
“Capricious, reckless, and in need of guidance,” “petulant and hard to please”: Gwendolen Harleth points out her flaws early and often in this secret confession to Deronda, the man who offers concern but not the love she craves. Gwendolen meets Deronda at a European spa where she has fled after being wooed by a rich but possibly sinister suitor, Henleigh Grandcourt. Beautiful and headstrong but hampered by her family’s ruined fortunes, Gwendolen is expected to make a good marriage to keep her mother and four stepsisters afloat. But she does not love Grandcourt, attracted instead to Deronda’s honesty and pure-mindedness. Her family’s worsening finances, however, force Gwendolen to overlook her doubts and accept Grandcourt. Three weeks later, she finds herself trapped in marriage to a cruel, vicious man. Meeting Deronda at social events, Gwendolen becomes even more deeply aware of her misery, but Deronda is now following his own path and can offer only sympathy and encouragement, even when Gwendolen is widowed. Souhami’s narration is deft and painstaking but, confined to Gwendolen’s self-absorbed perspective, has a limited range, further hindered by the more static phase the story enters after the sadistic marriage ends. Gwendolen still pines for Deronda but heals, rejoins society and spends time with George Eliot—“I had a sense of unreality, as if I was a work of fiction, a creation of her pen”—eventually learning to stand on her own two feet.
Playing with ideas about creativity, exploring Victorian gender roles and women’s rights, Souhami’s first novel is a well-crafted, idea-driven curiosity.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62779-340-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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
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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