A bumbling lummox turned business superstar in 15th-century Europe is the hero of the first volume of a promised historical series, by the author of several mysteries and the Francis of Lymond novels. Claes is an oversized apprentice in the dye-shops of the Charetty company; he's widely known to be humble, clumsy and hilarious, with a streak of inventive genius. His numerous pranks have incurred the wrath of the town leaders of the merchant city of Bruges, culminating in a near-fatal fight with the handsome and loathsome Simon of Kilmirren. Marian de Charetty, the widowed owner of the company Claes serves, offers her beleaguered apprentice the option of joining a band of mercenaries on their way to Milan. Claes counterproposes that the small army act as a courier service, carrying documents over the Alps. On arriving in Milan, Claes calls on the local branch of the Medici and on other powerful personages, tantilizing them with carefully gleaned information and trade secrets he's pieced together from letters he's carried and codes he's deciphered. He also drops a provocative hint: that the monopoly on alum (the scarce white powder used to bind dye to cloth) that this group enjoys is threatened by the so-far secret existence of a new, conveniently located mine. The Medici become a major customer for Claes' courier (and information) service, and they pay him well to keep quiet about the alum. Claes heads back to Bruges, where suddenly he's someone: dealing with all the businessmen who once rolled their eyes at his juvenile tricks, he wheels and deals, makes new contacts, and acts as the brains of the expanding Charetty business—and, always the lady's man, he has a top-secret affair with the spunky Katelina van Borselen, a young noblewoman. Then owner Marian makes a business proposition: she asks Claes to up his respectability by marrying her. For the sake of the firm, he accepts. Now known as Nicholas (or Niccolo), he heads back to Milan for more business triumphs. And brave new plans are in the offering. A knotty confusion of names, places and schemes, but overall an engrossing, often witty portrayal of the early throes of commerce, fleshed out with satisfying characters and complex alliances.
Pub Date: Sept. 12, 1986
ISBN: 0375704779
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1986
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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