Despite some stumbles, interesting historical details and compelling characters create a captivating, albeit melodramatic,...
Book 2 of Peake’s (Arbutus Halethorpe and the Elevator Murders, 2018, etc.) three-volume historical drama picks up the story of four friends who met in Paris in 1900, were separated by circumstance, and who now begin to reconnect in 1905.
Suzanne de Lamothe, Jennie Latmore, Geste D’Arcourt, and Charlie Clark have moved on with their lives since Book 1. Suzanne, now a prostitute of high standing working in an apartment in Paris’ Latin Quarter, has an especially important client who wants to set her up as his exclusive mistress. Charlie is in Vienna receiving treatment from Sigmund Freud for heroin addiction and a fondness for the occasional young man. He meets and falls in love with Marta Schrattenthaler, daughter of a rear admiral in the Austro-Hungarian Royal War Navy. Geste, still in love with Jennie but having been unable to find her after his return from the American Southwest, accepts commissions to paint vignettes from the French colonies. His world travels include spending many months in Saigon and traversing the Sahara. Meanwhile, Jennie has abandoned Paris for Nice, working in a hat shop and gradually gaining a substantial following as a portrait artist. It’s in Nice that Geste finally reconnects with her. Peake does his best to catch new readers up on his four protagonists, but a thorough understanding of these complex characters requires a sequential reading of the series. Comfortable prose approximating the cadence of the era re-creates the excitement of Europe in the early 20th century even as the inexorable march toward WWI hovers menacingly (and descriptively) in the background. Unfortunately, the text, as in Book 1, is littered with linguistic errors (e.g., “She easily noticed him, he bring the largest man in the room”). Ultimately, though, this is an engaging narrative about four individuals, each of whom gets a starring role in alternating chapters, navigating life’s fortunes and heartbreaking tragedies.
Despite some stumbles, interesting historical details and compelling characters create a captivating, albeit melodramatic, read.Pub Date: July 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-71778-087-4
Page Count: 418
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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