A gothic tale in which moments of tedium are relieved by morbidity.
A boy hits the wrong bird with a slingshot, with lifelong consequences, in this second venture into gothic territory from Setterfield, author of the hugely popular The Thirteenth Tale (2006).
The book begins in the mid-19th century, in an English village whose focal point is a textile mill. At age 10, William Bellman, showing off for two friends, shoots a rook with a slingshot. Two decades later, William is rising rapidly through the ranks at the mill. He is the nephew of Paul, the owner’s son, however, William’s advancement is due more to sheer diligence than to nepotism. He has mastered every aspect of the mill’s operation when a series of unfortunate events advances his career prospects beyond his wildest dreams. The owner dies, apparently of old age, then Paul expires suddenly. Other deaths follow in quick succession, including those of William’s mother and Luke, one of two witnesses to the slingshot incident. Only the reader is aware, due in part to the appearance of these birds before each death and intermittent segments detailing the mythology and lore surrounding them, that rooks are harbingers of doom. William is oblivious, although a stranger in black appears at each funeral, regarding him sardonically. By now, William owns the mill since the last heir, Charles, an artist, also suffered a rook-related death after William’s artistically gifted daughter Dora showed Charles a drawing of her favorite black-plumaged bird. It isn’t until most of William’s family are wiped out by an epidemic that he suspects the strange Mr. Black’s role in all this. Desperate to save Dora, he enters into a bargain with Black, the exact terms of which remain obscure, even at times to William, but it involves opening a Selfridge’s-like London emporium specializing in the trappings of mourning and funerals. Although this novel succeeds in creating an atmosphere of creeping dread, the effect is attenuated by too much detail about the running of mills and department stores and also by a growing puzzlement over why an impulsive childhood transgression, never repeated, should exact such a terrible penalty.
A gothic tale in which moments of tedium are relieved by morbidity.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1195-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Emily Bestler/Atria
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
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 modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
